109 e3b against spitfire II

[Viper2000]

Originally Posted by TomcatViP

resume of above edit :

Q: Why the 109 is useless against Spit II
A(s):
a/It's historical fact
b/we got crappy FM and the Spit hve to get the 12lbthat & that thing (that I miiss from IL2 )
c/ (added certainly to makes good figure) Oh ..; by the way the Hurri shld also get the 12lb eng

and so on and so on ...

C'mon guys : there was no 12lb Spits - there was AN EMERGENCY SWITCH in SOME of the plane based in england !
The Merlin XX did get 9lb boost and it was an after BoB engine
The FM of the Spits is simply surrealistic even for the MkI
This is not the number (perf achieved ) it's in the way it can turn and climb (E grabber) - TAKE TIME to fly in ALL the planes we hve for now: IT'S SO OBVIOUS !

So pls be constructive not selfish and don't touch the superb FM we hve for now for both the Hurri and the 109 to fit your own expectation.

Those men were brave. There were not in anyway counting on any X-men to fight for their freedom.

Pretty much all Spitfires & Hurricanes were running on 100 octane fuel with +12 psi war emergency power available during the battle. This is extensively documented.

All Spitfires and Hurricanes had boost control cutouts until later in the war when gated thottles began to appear.

You can get into an argument about how much boost was developed by operating the cutout; but at sea level it was never less than +12 (early Merlins prior to the +12 mods would actually deliver about +17 with the cutout operated, much to the detriment of the engine given that prior to +12 mods they were running on 87 octane).

Very few Merlin XXs took part in the Battle of Britain.

It's possible that they might only have been cleared to +9 in FS gear in the very early days. I haven't investigated this because I've never been especially interested in the early production Hurricane II; it's perhaps analogous to getting deeply involved in the performance of the Bf-109F0 in the same time period.

However, it seems extremely unlikely that the Merlin XX would not have been cleared to at least a +12 combat rating in MS gear at entry into service because in MS gear it's turning the 10.25" supercharger at 8.1516 times crankshaft rpm. This is lower than the Merlin III (8.588 ) or XII (9.089) and would therefore produce a lower charge temperature.

The Merlin in Perspective credits the XX with a +14 combat rating in MS gear and a +16 rating in FS gear, with the takeoff boost being +12.

So really you don't have much of a leg to stand on unless you want to take the view that 100 octane fuel was some kind of collective hallucination by everybody involved...

The most likely explanation for the +9 rating is either a typographical error, or simply the use of a non-combat rating for whatever test you've got that figure from.

This, of course, is a debate about reality. Matters are complicated by the fact that, at least at present, the sim has quite a strange FM which seems to have some important problems, not least of which is erroneous engine indications for all the Spitfires & Hurricanes.

The Spitfire II, when last I tested it, has optimistic +12 performance but questionable full throttle heights and incorrect boost indications, and therefore almost certainly other problems.

The Spitfire I seems to have some kind of hybrid 87 octane performance, but again I'm not really sure what's going on because the boost indications are actually wrong for that as well.

At the moment, I don't think you can really say that the Spitfire is too good or too bad, because the testing that I've done suggests that it's just plane wrong in a sufficiently large number of particulars that it's almost pointless to get into that kind of debate.

In any case, it takes two to tango, and although I'm no expert on the 109, I have absolutely no reason to believe that it's been modelled perfectly either.

I think that the solution is to wait until the sim stabilises a bit, perhaps after the US release, and then set about a rigorous test programme to actually get to the bottom of what's going on.

Of course, even if we get kinematic performance of all the aeroplanes to closely match test data, that's just the start; we've also got to deal with the reliability and cooling difficulties associated with running at high power, because otherwise everybody will be screaming along in war emergency power the whole time, which might well have "balance" implications, in as much as some aeroplanes would probably gain more from this unrealistic performance capability than others...