Performance data for VVS aircraft?

[CaptainDoggles]

Originally Posted by Sven

Yeah I know right, not that the actual crates came from factories, no way man, I heard they grew from the LA-5 tree in Eastern Siberia.

I bet they were actually flown from the factory to the front line in many cases. My point is that what comes out of the factory is not necessarily what is fighting, regardless of which air force we're discussing. You think no Spitfires or Bf 109s were damaged between factory and operational airbase?

Editing of certain 'numbers' by the government in the USSR was not uncommon (post-war mostly). The whole FM thing is so complicated the guy over at developers studio must have nightmares from it.

Whatever. I'm looking for as many different sets of numbers as possible. The truth will come out. You can enjoy your conspiracy theory about how the Soviets edited their documents post hoc.

[JG52Karaya]

From my experience of looking at Soviet test data, the most important thing is to differentiate between testing of serial produced aircraft and so called "etalon" production standard setters, the latter usually being way better than anything that ever came out of a factory to front lines units and thus being completely unrepresentative.

[Korn]

Soviet aircraft had notoriously bad manufacturing standards, especially early in the war when they needed many machines fast. Much more so then any other country. So differences between a test plane and a real fighting plane could be huge, depending on batch and even on an individual basis.

Also the commie propaganda machines would make sure to crank up to numbers for "morale".

Sorry for my poor english, i'm in a hurry.

[Danelov]

The Yak family is good covered in the "Le Fana de l' Aviation". Numbers allround of the 300th. Of course, in french.

[TomcatViP]

Yeah tht was a huge series of good articles on the Yacks and La's. From Yehfim Gordon I think. Charts (credible ) were included. Do you remember the Mustang story that went at the same time ?

The Yack were so good starting from the 9 series that they had an edge at low alt. The bad points were concern with visibility, skin smoothness due to wood and moisture and wing airfoils that were fairly outdated.

Regarding marksmanship of large wood panels man hve to remind that the Soviet mastered this techniques and although it was not durable it could produce really good result.

At the end of the war French air Force had late Fw, Spits and Yack 3 tested against each other by vets in a dogfight scenario. The Yack3 went out of the top !

[TomcatViP]

Are you talking abt the guy that did land a 25 in japan for the reward ?

[CaptainDoggles]

Well I got hold of Самолетостроение в СССР which has some nice charts in it. Are there others out there? From what I gather it's necessary to go in person to the Russian national archives because they refuse to send out copies.