[Laurwin]

I believe that in practical terms, it is valuable to know enemy plane's capability and your own plane's capability.

Know yourself and your enemy and you will triumph in thousand battles.

Obviously different aircraft characteristics exist for different planes. This has been established.

Characteristics such as top speed, - and perhaps even acceleration. (heavy overweight planes like p47 don't seem to accelerate fast, actually tempest seems to suffer slightly from the same thing)

And these characteristics are different at different altitudes (this is the reason for all those DREADED CHARTS that they made in black-and-white paper for studying the aircraft effectiveness in WW2)

Does this have any relevance to the game though? Well, ideally speaking the physics determine the viability of tactics and to some extent even strategy.

Physics is behind the "rules of thumb" that they gave to real life fighter pilots, rules like "never dogfight with zero" (it was posted on a placard in squadron mess somewhere in Pacific)

So, basically all of this ought to help in finding out tactics on how to use certain planes against certain enemies.


More about the speed characteristic. I do remember reading about a Finnish ww2 fighter pilot's advice to new pilots. He noted that basically assuming 1v1 scenario, the socalled speed differential (difference in speeds, of the two airplaes) is one important factor. IF the speed differential is too much disadvantegous, then this is cleaarly bad thing you could say. Practical example of this situation is e.g. brewster buffalo vs la5, p38 vs zeke

The enemy will possibly be able to gain overwhelming energy advantage, if he can keep fighting for long time, and keeps slowly building his energy. Something like that I think. It maybe was from Hans Wind fighter pilot...