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Originally Posted by Pit
... you are NOT correct that all of the A/C I flew were "fly by wire".... ONLY the F-16 was... The F-111 and F-4 were mechanical linkage with hydraulic boosted sytems.... otherwise known as "hydromechanical"... you worked hard in these A/C!!
You ARE correct in the fact that the rudder is not extensively used ESPECIALLY in the F-16 until airspeed dropped to around 300 knots... in fact the computer on the F-16 "locked out" the use of the rudder above 350 knots. BUT, the optimum "dogfighting" speed for the F-16 is from 350 to about 400 knots!!  And though They were all MEANT for BVR fighting... how often does that actually happen... it doesn't... current ROE is that we STILL have to VISUALLY identify a target. So we STILL train for the furball!!
You are correct that actual sustained furballs have not happened for a long time... but we STILL train for them... and it is STILL very grueling... EVEN in F-16's!!  EVEN in extended and sustained furballs... trust me...
the fatigue does not set in until AFTER it has ended, no matter how much you are working in the cockpit... you are literally fighting for you life... the adrenaline DEFINATELY staves off the fatigue until the fight is over!!! The BIGGEST problem is blackouts... greyouts... and redouts... adrenaline does NOTHING for those!!!
... BUT in reality... high G maneuvers are only going to occur for a couple of minutes at a time before the air speed bleeds off so much you need to do something about it.... and I do not care what type A/C you are in!!  |
lets forget about redouts and blackouts for the moment, because the thread is mainly about modeling fatigue correctly, and that is difficult enough as it is
even if only the f16 was a true fly by wire aircraft, the
hydraulically boosted system in the other 2 aircraft you flew in is still SIGNIFICANTLY better and lighter to use than the controls in most single seater fighter aircraft of ww2, and those of the early war BoB period.
there must be figures to quantify this, and give us a number for stick resistance in full deflection for various directions (at various speeds), and the same for full rudder deflection. i suspect the forces involved are somewhere around 4x higher than those in the modern hydraulically boosted systems you experienced.
and ...
i suspect that when you talk about training for a "sustained furball" in those more modern aircraft, the actual total amount of time you might have been stomping hard on the rudder for full deflection AND stirring the stick to various directions at full deflection, might have been about 10 minutes out of a 2 hr flight. add to that another 10 min of less strenuous maneuvres, and that would have been the sortie ?
the problem we have in il2 is at the other extreme of the argument. the way it is at the moment you can take a ww2 single seater and do wild maneuvers continuesly for the full duration that your fuel last (eg up to 2 hrs). in the bigger online servers you can see this going on most days, and it is very unrealistic. a person might have been continuesly hard maneuvering in a big furrball, and then get chased home for another 15 min with 2 enemies on his tail while he is constantly making wild erratic maneuvers to prevent getting shot down.
that is simply impossible for a human to sustain. on some other il2 forums this exact question was asked to several ww2 pilots who actually flew those planes, and they commented that if they saw that kind of erratic and wild defensive movement they would simply backoff and wait a few minutes for the other person to become exhausted, and then move in for an easy kill. in real life you simply couldnt fly like that more than a few minutes.
i work in medical physiology and i can assure you adrenaline is no wonder chemical that can justify that superman strength for such prolonged periods of time that we see right now in il2. when the japs did the death marches in asia (like burma), or the nazi's worked millions of slave labourers to their death, adrenaline didnt save those people either.
with the death marches in asia (or those done by the russians with their german prisoners after Stalingrad for ex) a fully fit man could be pushed to total exhaustion in a few days on those forced marches, and "all they had to do" was simply keep on walking ! even with a jap soldier standing over him with a bayonet to finish him of like a dog as he lay in the mud next to the road, he didnt find a sudden burst of adrenaline to keep on walking.
that might sound like an extreme example, but i see the same in the performance testing of athletes. you can have a fit and well trained athlete that you expose to a continues series of exercises at high resistance, and his performance will significantly drop after a relatively short period of time. he simply cant put out the same high workload forever. and even if you would put a growling tiger next to him to motivate him, that would only give him a brief lift in performance for a short period, and then the exhaustion would return and his performance drops massively.
i dont doubt the experience you describe is real for modern times, but you didnt continuesly work stick and rudder at full strenght for the full duration of the sortie, and the resistances you worked with are probably 25 or 30% of what they had to deal with in ww2. adrenaline can stave off mental exhaustion for many hours, but does not eliminate physical fatigue during sustained high workloads.