P51

[Voyager]

Foz, if any plane could have done it, then the first two Schweinfurt's would not have been unescorted raids.

In large part, the reason the British switched to night bombing was because they couldn't escort their bombers, and they weren't willing, or even able to take the sort of casualties that unescorted daylight bombing incurred. We really couldn't either, but we had just started and had more reserves to go through before we started to hit the wall.

The Mustang has three time the internal tankage of the Spitfire, and its wet hardpoints were stressed for 1000lbs, about 150 gallons, theoretically, if/when drop tanks that could hold that much were developed. I believe the Spitfire could carry a ~100 gallon conformal tank under the centerline, but it was nondroppable, contained more fuel than the plane's maximum internal load, and significantly degraded performance.

It's not as simple as add tanks until the wings fall off, and to pretend that it is, is roughly equal to saying any plane could turn in on a Zero; true only under such tightly limited conditions as to render the statement no better than false.

[FOZ_1983]

the "flying fortress" named so because it has so mnay guns and with overlapping fields of fire, it didnt need an escort.

In theory great, in practise not so great.


Bomber command in the later years were bombing more accuratly by night than the us by day (thanks to technology of course). How can you realistically escort bombers at night? very difficult.

The P51 was meant for long range, it could handle it. Spit was short range. Though could of gone long range IF needed. But like agreed, if its not broke why fix it.

No doubting the 51 was a superb if not the best escort fighter, and a huge morale booster to friendly bombers that saw it.

And when i say "any" fighter, in general i was reffering to the obvious ones, not things that are out dated or obsolete by that time. Error on my part, i could of worded that better

[Doktorwzzerd]

This question keeps coming up and it seems like a lot of people haven't heard, but the P-51 in the game is modeled incorrectly, as admitted by the Devs, and is being fixed for the title update.

The mistake had to something to do with the modeling of the fuel tanks, though I don't know whether thats external or internal tanks. I assume that this is true on all models of 51 because all of them handle like shee-it. I would argue that performance would not even be realistic on an Allison engined 51; if the in-game performance of the 51 were reflective of real life the plane never would have been accepted for front-line service, let alone be universally recognized as a war-winning design and pilot favorite. Even the I-16 is a better dog fighter in-game than the current P-51 so I really don't think it has to do with any player technique or subtle historical understandings, its just wrong and the devs have come clean about it (kudos to them for doing so) and, thank god, are fixing it.

If there is a mod reading, would you please create a sticky with info on the P-51 situation so that everyone new to the forums will know its being fixed?

[LostInSpace]

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that the P-51 was incorrectly modeled with 100% fuel load at all times thus causing the horrible handling. This includes the dreaded 85 gallon tank behind the pilot (which pilots burned off first) and possibly the two drop tanks which aren't in BOP at all.