F4u-4 and F8F

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by Laurwin

thx for the answer icefire.

Well, true enough, good teamwork works well enough with wildcats vs zekes, I hope it would work also with corsair vs george/frank (n1k2 ki84).

Also I'm not ranting, actually as a matter of fact I just had a great evening on skies of valor server, I had personal IL-2 record sofar there. By my own calculations on yesterday's game, I had 16:1 victory/defeat ratio + 3 damaged enemy ac. My aerial defeat came when I went strafing enemy base alone, I got bounced by two p-38s. I had two kills in the bag already though.


On one hand, I understand, that the game would become quite complicated to balance, if we went with completely historically accurate "circumstances"
(lack of spare parts, poor engine quality, poor fuel quality etc...)

On the other hand, aviation fuel quality was quite important technological factor to have in WW2. After all, all engines use fuel, even the best engine is simply an overengineered paperweight, unless supplied with dinosaur-remains, petrol products. Power comes from the chemical energy of the fuel, does it not?

I dunno how accurate this is but here's this web-article, Dr Peter W. Becker, University of South Carolina, for the significance of avgas quality in WW2 http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/a...aug/becker.htm


Essentially, the site says, because of American high quality avgas, Allied airforces were able to field aircraft engines which had better power output. Substantial increases in aircraft speed, range, and ceiling would be made possible with high octane avgas.

These advantages Germany was unable to obtain until 1945 or so, claims the article. I would hazard a guess that the high octane fuel bottleneck prevented Luftwaffe from having properly functioning high altitude fighter aircraft, at an earlier time. Worse German fuel, compared to Allied fuel, would lead to bad compression ratio in German engines, meaning less power output.

Whole other can of worms you're opening there

The short version is that the original flight models for these aircraft were done with various choices in place and plenty of arguments and bickering on the old Oleg's Ready Room forum (Ubisoft Forums). Most aircraft were modelled with best possible performance numbers which may not have always been the best decision in my mind (I'd rather war typical performance levels).

I'd also wager that the best known performance data on the Japanese aircraft may have come from Allied sources rather than from Japan. The Allies tested Japanese aircraft extensively and often with better gas and maintenance than front line Japanese squadrons... at least this is what I've read. Which suggests the best sources we have on the rarer Japanese types are somewhat higher performing than they probably did in the field. By how much is also open to debate of course.

Again... all of that is a totally different can of worms. I'll stop before I tempt fate and we see a 30 pager