Soviet fighters and 4.12

[IceFire]

Originally Posted by jermin

It's beyond ridiculous.

Just spent some time doing some tests regarding the overheat on various Russian fighters, in the same manner I tested K4 (described at page 8 of this thread). All of the Russian planes I tested have a more endurable engine than K4 does.

The most ridiculous plane is, you guess it, I-185-M71. Its engine starts to overheat at about 3 and a half minutes after the quick mission starts. And the damage occurs at around 8 minutes 20 seconds into the mission, at which a thin black smoke trail comes out of the engine. But the engine sound and effective engine power doesn't reduce until over 10 minutes has passed since the test starts.

Bear in mind that Russian engines are historically unreliable and easily overheating. In no way they can achieve a higher efficiency than contemporary German engines do.

You'd make a better argument if your Russian example was a plane that actually saw some service beyond a front line field trial. I-185 is extremely optimistic as most prototypes are. If it's a Bf109K-4 uber fighters comparison then take the Yak-9U or La-5FN/La-7 as the example aircraft.

I will say that the one problem with the Yak's damage model is that the engine model does seem to be simplistic in that it doesn't have the fine levels of damage that you typically see from planes that have been given more attention. The Yak's engine is either utterly destroyed or functioning just fine with very few states in between. Bf109s, Mustangs, P-40s, Ki-61s and other types are much more subtle... this is purely subjective and I'd love it if someone could have a look at the code and let us know what's going on in there.

But as far as purely overheat is concerned it seems to overheat just like the 109 does.

Blanket statement about Russian engines overheating and being unreliable also seems unhelpful. SOME Russian engines were not very reliable but it's dependent on the model involved. The later model VK-105PF in most of the Yak's, by all accounts, gave a decent performance and operated well in harsh high and low temperatures from every account I've ever read. The upgraded VK-107 was another story.

That's not to say that German engines were entirely trouble free either either due to engineering or, later in the war, on occasion sabotage or reduced manufacturing quality. But that's neither here nor there as reliability issues such as that aren't specifically modelled for any side.

You might be right that the way it's modelled is wrong. But yelling "It's beyond ridiculous" is counter productive. Make the entirety of your argument with some data to work with... otherwise there isn't anything TD or anyone else can do.