www.riseofflight.com

[brando]

I'm also interested to find out whether the developers will have worked on issues involving fatigue, both to airframes and engines as well as the pilots.
It's all very well to talk about airspeeds and barrel rolls and stall speeds, but the WW1 planes are not similar to the far more standardised models of the WW2 era. We're not just talking about engine size and wing area - it's important that the age and history of the airframe is taken into account as well.
These kites were much more easily strained by high-speed manoeuvring than the later metal monoplanes, while repair and maintenance facilities were much less specialised. Much less was understood about metal fatigue for example, and it wasn't uncommon for aircraft to literally fall to pieces in flight. Likewise - it wasn't uncommon for engines to fail "just like that", quite often just after take-off.

I think that flight simulations suffer from 'gamer-ism' in these respects. Not all aircraft flew like the modern replicas, carefully-tended and with modern materials used for safety reasons in the modern age. While I wouldn't want to see a replica-pilot fall out of the sky in real life - I'd hate to see the developers roll over to satisfy the demands of the gamers, and provide the kind of planes that fly strictly according to some performance-freak's set of graphs.

B