Hey TD can you look again at the Corsair..

[horseback]

Originally Posted by EJGr.Ost_Caspar

I don't wonder about LaGG-3 - the series 66 is a beast in game. I don't know, if it is modelled realistically or optimistically, but I rather supect later.

I wonder about P-38. I aways thought it was a quite good plane in game (I love to fly it) and found speed and climb good as I expected it (never expected it to be nimble). Reading, that it should accelerate and climb faster, is well... surprising.

The P-38 had a lot of power, even with that big airframe, and the turbosuperchargers let you use all of those two Allison engines' power at any altitude. It was designed and built to the pre-radar era's definition of an interceptor, so it needed excellent (not merely good) climb to height capability, and as we all know, the better an aircraft climbs, the faster it can usually accelerate. If you consider that the prototype was an eyelash short of 400mph in August of 1939, you will begin to better appreciate what a technical achievement it was; in many senses, if the United States Army had gotten it directly into production immediately, it would have been superior to the Bf 109E and the Spitfire Mk I in many important ways.

I suspect that the Lightning's reputation was 'colored' in the same way the P-40's maneuverability was; it was most effectively used in the Pacific, where the Gold Standard for maneuverability was the Oscar or the Zero--by comparison to these aircraft, a P-40 or a Lightning was 'not' very maneuverable. They were, however, faster, more heavily armed and better armored, so in that theater Warhawk and Lightning pilots traded on those strengths. In North Africa, the Lightning's sustained turn and ability to instantly turn its speed and kinetic energy into a steep zoom climb shocked the LW pilots who initially encountered it. It took a while to notice that its instant roll rate was lacking, or that it could not safely dive from 30,000 ft/10km and successfully pursue a 109 or 190 the way the P-47 or the Mustang could.

The big reason that the Lightning was not more widely used was that it needed the same turbosuperchargers required for the B-17 and B-24, it required a lot of 'hand building', one special 'handed' Allison engine that rotated in the opposite direction for each aircraft and it was simply not designed for mass production in any case; as a result, it was not available in the desired numbers during 1942-43 and the USAAF instead developed the P-47 and (grudgingly) the P-51 to the point that these aircraft approached or exceeded the Lighting's performance and range. At the same time, the design appears to have been 'frozen' in some respects in a misguided attempt to keep the production lines moving. The P-38's control layout was an ergonomic disaster for a pilot wearing the cold weather gear necessary for its poorly heated cockpit; even in moderate conditions, it was less than ideal and just plain inferior to its contemporaries/competitors.

On top of this, these types both were safer and better performing at extreme high altitudes and could (easily) counter the LW's preferred escape method at high alts: rolling and diving at a steep angle. Even so, any model of the P-38 was well-known to be able to easily out-climb and out accelerate the Thunderbolt and the Mustang even after they had been 'improved' with the paddle-blade props & water injection or the Merlin engine and an overload fuselage tank.

In any case, had the P-38 been available in close to the desired numbers early in the war, the P-47 would have remained a short ranged point defense fighter and the Mustang might never have gotten a Merlin power plant; the improvements that created these aircraft as we remember them wouldn't have been needed in 1943.

The Lightning in Il-2, like the Hellcat, does not perform to data well-known and published here in the States; I suspect that looking at these aircraft and their weights, someone in Moscow decided that those numbers just couldn't be right, and used numbers from God knows where but more to their liking. Even the 'enhanced' Lightning version is short of the published performance of the type, and the 'compressibility' model it is subject to being extended below 6500m is simply not right, in both the factual and the ethical senses of the word.

If the LaGG-3 (66) was modeled 'optimistically', then the P-38 was modeled pessimistically.

cheers

horseback