No disrepect, but at the very least the key ingredients for a Battle of Britain experience is the right planes, and a Spit Mk1 is one of them. Now I'm not complaining, but I have to admit to being a little dissapointed if the key aircraft in the Battle of Britain campaign are the wrong type.

Forgive me, I'm British, and aircraft nut and I'm passionate about our finest hour, pumping cannon shells into Heinkels over the docklands just won't feel right :(

Completely agree. Also, the difference between cannons and machine guns is staggering. I can live with the Hurricane in game, but literally blowing apart a heinkill with a 2 second burst from a spitfire mark Vb just won't feel right, as skii said, and it won't be realistic for the battle of britain. My opinion may sound as though I'm knitpicking, but I don't think it's an easy mistake to make..far from it. All you need to do is wiki search battle of britain, and the info on planes used will be there. ;)

That's my point. The guys making this game obviously know rather a lot about aircraft, and even if they didn't, a 2 minute search on wikipedia would tell them about even the most obscure aircraft variants.

These models and textures take a hell of a lot of time and money to create. They obviously choose very carefully exactly what kind of aircraft they want to make a model of. And for whatever reason, they chose these ones.

Remember, singleplayer isn't their only consideration. They probably want to have the Spitfires and Hurricanes balanced nicely with the Bf 109 for multiplayer, and if the Bf 109 has a cannon armament and the British planes don't, that could be a big problem.

Either way, remember that this is a flight sim, not a time machine. Shooting down He 111s over the channel isn't going to feel quite right, because you're sitting in a couch looking at at TV screen rather than flying the real thing. :D

Thanks for support - and you are right in most of your suggestions, including the one about time machine.
It is literally impossible to reproduce some of a differences between planes.
For example, in Mig plane, if plane goes to nose-diving canopy blocked, and pilot wasn't able to bail out, leading to death. That's why they flew with canopy opened, so the speed was lower, but it was safer, so texhnical limit wasn't achieved.
La-5 has an awful exhausting, and the temperature was 55-60 degrees (celsium) - making maneuvering harder for pilot. How it can be reproduced in the game?
I am not planes specialist, neither historical consultant, not British, and not responsible for planes in any aspect. Actually, I am not even PM of a project. But we are working with historical consultants, and if team have chosen one or other modification (even if it was actually unpopular, rare, or has some obvious disadvantages which were omitted) - than they had reasons for doing that.
The game, even flight sim game, is NOT encyclopedia by any means. It has to provide fun. If one plane is obviously 100% worser than all other planes in all realism settings and all multiplayer mode, controlling by AI or even novice players - than probably this plane should be replaced with its better modification, especially if we need this plane for specific campaign.

Even educational and documentary(!) films, have some certain mistakes, and nobody complains about that.
Most famous 'Battle for Britain' or 'Attack on Pearl Harbour', which are feature films, have a lot of mistakes - and still are great movies.

Sorry for being so lengthy, but it was one of our main headache - how much close to reality should we stay.
Sales and ratings willl show were we right :)

Well Marcho, as I'm sure you've read, we all care a great deal about the details. We don't need the Spits and Hurris balanced nicely with the BF109. That's Heroes Over Europe talk! :) Seriously tho, if they have all the little pros and cons they had in real life, the balance will be there.

Could anyone explain the difference between Cannons and Machine guns. Sorry i know this sounds quite naive, but honestly i don't know.

a cannon is 20mm or larger, a machine gun is 20mm or smaller

I'm sure glad I finally got my HDtv working with my Xbox yesterday!:)

The pictures are absolutely amazing. I love what you guys did with the ground details. Thank you guys very much for all of the hard work you put into this for us.

It is impossible to perfectly recreate the aircraft. Can't be done. Remember how few of these aircraft actually remain flyable in the world. Even if every developer had personally flown every Spitfire variant, they still couldn't program in every single variable in the world, because there are literally millions. Everything from weather to how a plane flies differently when its hydraulics are shot out in the left wing or something.

The best you can do is an approximation of reality. And since we all agree IL-2 BOP is a much, much closer approximation and more authentic combat flight sim than anything else out there, what's the problem? It's like complaining about a first person shooter because it doesn't look exactly like real life, even if this shooter still looks way better than all of the other ones.

Besides, the aircraft at many points weren't perfectly balanced in the actual conflict either.

Nobody wants to hear "Oh yeah, that Fw 190 can shoot down your Spitfire no problem because it could in real life for this brief period in 1942" or whatever to explain why one aircraft is overpowered in multiplayer. That's not a valid reason for unbalancing the game.

Hell, the fact that the multiplayer of any game will inevitably have internet lag alone makes it impossible to recreate real life flight characteristics, where there is no lag.

Anton explained it quite well, I think. As I said earlier, I think some of you are being unreasonably nitpicky about this.

While explosive bullets were developed for machine guns, all cannon shells were meant to explode. The hitting power was tremendous, as a cannon round would not merely penetrate and expend itself, it would detonate and take a piece of the target with it.