Quote:
Originally Posted by White Owl
I don't own the game yet because my computer broke and I'm waiting on parts, so just looking at Youtube videos for now. 
I posted earlier that I've seen a whole lot of real-life aircraft tachometers in operation, since I fixed airplanes professionally for years. Most of those tachs were mechanical, not electric. I have never seen a tachometer needle bounce around like I'm seeing in the videos, not under any circumstance. However... I'm willing to accept the possibility that British and Italian tachometers of the era could have differed from anything else I've ever seen. It's also very likely that any currently airworthy warbirds will have modern instruments, so we can't divine the truth of the matter by looking at in-cockpit recordings now.
Ok. If the devs have evidence that tach needles of the day oscillated that badly, then let's keep it that way in the game.
But I can't help thinking it's very strange that in all the books I've read about WWII aviation - with so many reports from combat pilots comparing their aircraft to more modern planes - not once have I come across a phrase anything like "Of course, back then our engine instruments were so inaccurate you couldn't tell exactly what RPM it was turning, so we just set the throttle and prop controls to 'close enough' and got on with it." |
I have no first-hand experience but there's something else that makes me think that the old instruments were in fact a bit "funky". If you look at the way A2A simulations modeled it for their FSX add-on Spitfires, the RPM needle is also bouncing around the actual value quite a bit.