Mixture and Engine Pitch..

[ATAG_Dutch]

Originally Posted by KnightFandragon

What are these settings all about and how do I know what to set at what altitude and stuff?

There's a PDF file 'Aircraft Guide' in your IL2 program file which tells you recommended altitudes for supercharger and mixture settings by aircraft which is a good place to start. The higher the altitude, the less oxygen there is, so the less fuel the engine needs to mix with it. Leaving mixture on full rich will reduce the engine's burn efficiency, reducing performance.

Pitch is a bit more complex to explain, but if you fly straight and level, with your rate of climb indicator on zero, at 100% throttle you'll soon reach a steady speed. Coarsening the pitch a bit at this point is like changing up a gear in your car, your engine revs will drop but you'll accelerate if you stay on full throttle, and your revs will climb back up. If you coarsen it too much, your speed will drop as the engine tries to pull too 'high a gear'. Dropping the nose obviously increases the rate at which you speed up, and coarsening the pitch further prevents your engine over-revving.

Again similar to your car, acceleration with coarser pitch (higher gear) is less responsive, so you go to finer pitch for better acceleration, like dropping down a gear in your car. Also, finer pitch is needed for climbing, like going up a hill in your car, and to keep your engine in the optimum 'power band' of the rev range.
The AI pilots all do everything automatically in milliseconds, so their aircraft are all permanently set at optimum settings for everything.
Which is annoying.