Soviet fighters and 4.12

[JtD]

With the original overheat, most engines got damaged after 4:45 minutes of overheat message. That has little to do with overheat, and nothing to do with MW50 time limits. The current model also doesn't have a time limit for MW50, you can use it indefinitely unless you're overheating.

The statement in the 109K-4 manual re: MW50 is "under no circumstances use special emergency power for a duration of more than 10 minutes." It does not say "you can use it for 10 minutes no problem".

Anyway, for the fun of it I also went into QMB and made an 8 vs. 8 K-4 vs. Yak-9u, and I ran MW50 + 110% power for the entire fight right until rtb, for more than 15 minutes. I overheated a couple of times, but this would go away even in climbs at 500ish km/h, let alone in dives or in level flight. Radiators in auto, map Smolensk. No engine damage. The historically better suited Berlin map is another 5° cooler, so I wouldn't expect any trouble there at all.

Engines temps in air start are the same as in take off.

I'm curious about your fighting style, jermin. Do you turn a lot with combat flaps deployed or do you zoom climb up until near standstill? I've attached a plot of my dogfight against said Yak-9u's. More of a b'n'z style fight. As you can see, b'n'z puts a lot of stress on the engine, in particular if the climbing part is done to a very low speed. At about 3 minutes, I climbed up to less than 100 km/h - and you can see the temperatures soar at this time. So I avoided these very low speeds and zoomed up to only about 250 from then on. It can also be seen that the constant speed prop is too slow to adjust to the permanent air speed changes, this way I'm over-revving the engine in every dive. It's also apparent that if you fly above full throttle altitude (5-6 km) you'll be in less temperature trouble.

If you fly like this on the Crimea map, you'll be overheating a lot more (pretty much permanently), if you fly like this on the Berlin map, you won't be overheating at all.