It's drifting to the click-pit debate already, jesus.
Why isn't anybody bothered by Black Shark's clickpit? I'm sure it's a combat sim and not a civilian FSX clone, so why do 99.9% of the people who tried Black Shark love it still?
There's a very simple answer to that it's got all the functions of the original and you can manipulate them whichever way you want. That's what we should aim for in BoB as well.
Can you remember that ctrl+alt+shift+m switches between your magneto settings? Good for you, then do it this way.
You can't remember? No worries, reassign the keys for that or just click the damn knob.
You don't want to manually start up the engine? No worries either, press ctrl+e or something to that effect and watch the AI do it for you, just like it's done in FSX and Black Shark. You just have to wait until the AI pushes the buttons themselves, no instant engine on/off switch anymore, one more thing to think about when taking off with enemies nearby. A spitfire Mk.IX sequence barely took me 60 seconds maximum in a certain FSX addon when i first did it and that was because i didn't know where the buttons were, it takes half a minute to get it running normally and the automatic start follows the same procedure but is a bit faster as well.
So, what we should have is a sim that models as much of the airframe as possible, not just DM, turn rate/radius and engine HP. How the players interacts with these systems should be up to them, either via remapping keys or having a TrackIR set and clicking switches with the mouse, just give us both options and we can choose.
Did you know that maximum sustained boost in a late war Spit was a mere 7lbs and anything above that induced overheat and engine failure eventually? Or that a P47 had a very demanding engine management due to the existence of a turbo-supercharger (danger of over-revving)? A lot of the flying we do in IL2 is unrealistic and a lot of the match-ups and relative strengths and weaknesses between certain types of aircraft are wrong because of that one simple thing...we only model FM, DM and armament. We don't model the actual workload behind making these things work and that's what we should aim for.
Suddenly, aircraft that were inferior in performance in IL2 might become favorites because they are easier to manage. Planes like the Spit IX , the 109 or the 190 which had automated engine controls might suddenly become much more appealing than the P51 and P47 hotrods with their need for extra attention to the engine controls.
What's more, if the game engine can provide us a solid basis for modelling A/C subsystems, we might see a lot more interesting stuff in the future like radio navigation aids, blind bombing, airborne radar and so on. It would be a shame to miss out on so many things during the lifespan of the new series because our keyboards don't have enough keys to map functions to...i say copy everything from the real birds into the sim and simply let the users decide if and how they want to use it.
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