Quote:
Originally Posted by JtD
The HUD tells you the water injection is active because it is. It works above full throttle altitude. It did in real life. There's just no increased boost any more, and therefore there's no meaningful extra power. As it is in real life.
In game, the F4F manage around 295 mph at 5000ft. So clearly, the Wildcats do not "fall well short of generally accepted performance figures". Two of them are clearly overmodelled, and one of them falls "somewhat" short of generally accepted performance figures, and that not even at all altitudes. Unfortunately though, at the important ones.
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I used the term 'well short of accepted figures' for the Navy fighters as a group, which was a bit sloppy of me. The Wildcats are, however, shockingly
sssllllloooooowwww by any measure; over 10 seconds to gain a bit over 6 miles an hour can seem like hours after testing the Corsair at sea level. When you're struggling to maintain level flight by detecting whether the altimeter needle is moving (the variometer is at least a second behind the curve), the intervals take forever to go by, and when you finally reach the point where there just ain't no more, you glance at the speedbar and think "WTF?"
Even if they are about 20 kph faster than they should be, that impression is hard to shake.
In any case, the FM-2
is poorly represented, and if former pilots' direct testimony to me is to be believed, the tall-tail Wildcat
could accelerate with the Zeros and Oscars they encountered in the Marianas and the Philippines (the old guys picked out all of the Japanese fighters from my then-extensive collection of 1/72nd scale models and named each one --and corrected some of the color choices I made). Even accounting for the usual hypercompetitive BS factor present any time Navy veterans of any age meet, that means that like its climb, the FM-2's acceleration should be pretty good as well, even if measured against beat-up, poorly maintained A6M5s of the later war period. My former landlord said (realizing for the first time that my wife was present) that the FM-2 was "a he-heck of a lot uh,
peppier than the Dash Fours or even the Threes."
If it was anything like the one we have in Il-2 '46, there wouldn't have been three 70-something year old men in my living room that day in 1985.
cheers
horseback