Tomsk

If you just like flying planes around, or only fly single-player then balance doesn't much matter. If you enjoy competitive multiplayer combat then IMHO it's a lot more fun for both sides if the planes are reasonably well balanced .. and we do this for fun, right? I'm very much of the opinion that the performance of individual planes should be faithful to the numbers. However, the selection of which planes are available should be balanced. There are lots of planes that probably did fly against each other (Brewster Buffalo vs A6M2 .. Gloster Gladiator vs 109F) but that doesn't mean it's a fun engagement to simulate. The other things I'm happy to be "balanced" are things that are a bit of a guestimate anyway, such as the relative strength of MG vs cannon armament. DCS could sincerely use a bit of this IMO. Back to the original topic. I'd love to see some earlier 109 variants, but for the purposes of balance giving the P-51 access to 72" and upping the damage of MG armament would help it a lot.

Yeah that was really huge for me as well, when you realise that a "bounce" isn't a bounce but is caused by trying to land with too much speed and at the wrong attitude. You can do straight in approaches, but then need to be rather steep in the Spitfire, which comes with its own challenges. Curved ones are actually quite a bit easier. That's all about the footwork IMO. This was the other big thing for me, learning to stab and re-centre rather than holding. Lots of small corrections rather than big long ones. The Spitfire is especially hard, the P-51 and Dora are a lot more forgiving.

So I think you're pretty close, your touchdown attitude and landing speed is good, no bouncing. You're coming in a little hot, but you bleed the speed over the runway not force the plane down which is good. For me all of your issues are in the rollout. What's letting you down is your footwork. As dburne says, your inputs are too big and too late. This is causing you to get into an over-correction cycle where you go too far one way, so slam it hard the other, then overcorrect and have to push even harder back the other way. It's why you roll over from one wing onto the other in both videos. So ... try alternating rudder inputs left-right-left-right-left-right really quickly like this: left-right-left-right-left-right gentle stabs. If you want to go more left give it a bigger stab on the left. If you want to move more right, use a bigger stab on the right, but either way keep the rhythm going! If you really need to do a big correction, add a touch of brake (not hard, just a quick "blip"), but keep that left-right rhythm and never hold down any one direction for a sustained period. Even when you more or less want to keep going straight: left-right-left-right, just gently.

+1 I'd really like it for offline/coop play as well.

Stick with them, it'll click eventually :-) Curves wise I like about a 25-30% curvature, just makes them a little less twitchy around the centre. In terms of your landing difficulties, I've not seen your landing attempts (couldn't get the track to work) but from what you've described it sounds like you're trying to place the plane onto the ground, rather than let it stall itself onto the ground. I'd need to see a video to be sure, but it's a common problem and you can mostly get away with it in the Mustang, but not in the Spit. Ideally speaking (in a tail dragger) in the flare you want to hold the plane just above the runway as long as possible, whilst it loses speed. Eventually the plane won't have the energy to fly anymore and it'll sink onto the ground of its own accord. At this point it doesn't have the energy for any bouncing or anything like that. You keep the stick held all the way back and then let it roll out while dancing on the rudder. In practice I do this by holding a specific "landing attitude" in the flare, I memorise where the horizon should be relative to the canopy when the plane is parked on the ground and then hold that attitude in the flare. Keep a little bit of power on and the plane will settle itself onto the runway. However, what a lot of people end up doing is flying the plane onto the runway. You come down, you flare a bit but you basically fly the plane at the ground. Tail draggers don't like this and the result tends to be a "bounce" (which actually isn't a "bounce" at all, but instead a momentary change of momentum causing the plane to pitch up). As I said above, you can get away with this in a Mustang but if you do it in a Spitfire you'll almost certainly drop a wing in the rollout. Keep going with it. Yes it can be very frustrating, and I remember those days of lots and lots of practice, but eventually it will click into place and you'll find you can just do it. If you post a video (include the controls overlay - RCtrl+Enter) then I'm happy to give more in-depth feedback.

This works pretty well against 109s ... but you're probably not going to gain a serious advantage by trying to out dive/zoom a Dora. The P-51 is a little more aerodynamic .. but the Dora has a higher sustained top-speed on the deck. My experience (both flying the P-51 and Dora) is they are fairly comparable in the diving game, and the Dora is definitely less likely to break. Actually the biggest hindrance for the P-51 at the moment, IMHO is not the boost (though that would help) but the weaponry. The 50 cals currently just don't cut it for the kind of slashing attacks the P-51 is best suited to. I do agree that the tools for defeating the Germans are there, although I do think the Allies are at a disadvantage in terms of aircraft performance. I think the biggest thing allied pilots could do to improve their survival is to climb. Germans pilots (as a rule) gain altitude, and the allies don't. If you hold the altitude advantage in a superior performing plane then there's little your opponent can do to threaten you if flown properly. This is very much my experience when flying the Dora: if you have the altitude advantage you are more or less untouchable.

So I'm still definitely a beginner, but something that I've found really helpful I read on these forums. I think it was posted by <Blaze> but I can't find it now. Anyway, he said not to spend too much time heads down and that this is a common beginner mistake in BVR. See the contact on the radar, look out the cockpit and work out whereabouts that'll be in relation to the terrain. Then do all your beaming and cranks and all the rest in relation to the terrain, and with eyes mostly out the cockpit. You can reference the radar and RWR now and again to check the situation hasn't changed, but mostly be eyes out looking for the bandit or manoeuvring relative to the terrain. This has helped me a lot. Before I was finding exactly as you did, I did okay at longer ranges (where the radar works well) but up close I was just flapping about uselessly. I've very much started thinking of the radar as primarily a long-range tool, and that as things get closer I need to use the radar to help me transition to visual. You can actually spot contacts at quite a long range if you use the radar to help you know where to look.

I've been trying to learn BVR in the Mirage against the AI SU-27 ... and I lose pretty much every time. I've found that getting out an early missile helps a great deal, even if it's a bit long ranged it forces them to turn. If you don't then you're on the defensive and they're just going to spam you with missiles. I've also found eyes out the cockpit helps *massively*. You can do all the BVR stuff basically looking 95% outside. Otherwise when the merge comes I'm just flapping about wondering where they are ... death follows soon after. The early missiles are actually pretty easy to dodge and I can usually manage to force a merge now, but generally get splashed by those off-boresight missile shots. You can dodge a few, but they fire so many that eventually one gets you. I'm fairly new to modern jets (although I'm an experienced WWII pilot), but it certainly feels as if the Su-27 is holding most of the cards in this situation.

I've been flying on Blue Flag reasonably regularly, which has been really good.

Yes I run SRS at -95% mic boost ... just seems to be what it needs.

Okay It's possible I'm getting closer than that ... I mean I'm definitely not what you'd call "close" for taxiing as a wing-pair. I'll give it another try, really keeping my distance from him. AI taxi behaviour is something that could really use some work in DCS. I fly with a group that makes little co-op missions (nothing as sophisticated as baltic_dragon's) ... and we get *so* many problems with AI taxi behaviour. If they ever feel like they need to stop for some reason then they never start again. The campaign is excellent by the way baltic_dragon, favourite campaign I've played yet. Really immerse and has all those little details that makes it feel real, will definitely be looking forward to your next one.

I don't think so ... sometimes he gets a call from ATC telling him to hold, but no call to resume. Sometimes he just stops. There are some troops walking on the right, and I wonder if they're conflicting with him.

Mission 3 - the one with the AAR training. Most times my flight lead gets stuck taxiing ... just after he passes the troops (who are on the right) and the 2 mirages (on the left) he just sits there and won't move anymore. In the end, after 4 or 5 attempts, I had to skip the mission by editing the logbook.lua.

+1

Honestly, this is somewhat my current opinion. I'm enjoying the DCS WWII birds and I've been flying them online quite a bit. The VR support is great (big kudos to ED on that), and I really like the flight and systems modelling. However, I'm not seriously invested at the moment in DCS as a WWII platform. As Kurfürst says, the netcode isn't great and the DM is flat out terrible. Additionally there is no period map yet, even when we get it there are currently no plans for flyable bombers ... which IMO are really key for getting multiplayer scenarios that are more interesting than air quake. The fact that the current planes are not well balanced doesn't help either. WWII in DCS is a bit of a "jewel in the rough". There's some really great things about it, it has huge potential ... but there's a lot that still needs to happen IMO to make DCS a good general WWII sim. Maybe one day that'll happen, and I look forward to seeing it.

Very much true, a sim is never going to feel like the real thing. So the question is how can we make the sim to behave in a similar way. Clearly going into a 400mph dive, gently pulling on the stick and shearing the wings clean off isn't a sensible way for the sim to behave. Perhaps it's possible that in a real spitfire you could pull hard enough on the real stick to rip the wings off before you blacked out ... but it seems pretty unlikely. It's also not something you could do by accident or just by being slightly ham fisted ... so it should be the same in the sim. I would suggest that the stick force modelling is not yet implemented. Because being able to pull 11Gs in an instant and shear the wings off is probably something a human pilot simply would not be able to do ... and it's definitely not something they'd ever try to do. There's no doubt in my mind, the current behaviour is wrong however you look at it. Which isn't at all surprising given the Spitfire is a Beta release :)

Yes and no :) So the P-47 was used extensively for CAS operations, and it proved to be very good at it. However, this wasn't because it was ineffective as an air-superiority fighter. Before the US introduced the P-51 most of the escort work was done by the P-47 (the B/C razorbacks) and it proved to work well as a fighter, especially at high altitude. In some ways you could argue that by the time the P-51 came to Europe in serious numbers the air war was already almost over, won largely by the P-47. However, the P-47 lacked the range to escort the bombers all the way into Germany. The P-51 wasn't necessarily more effective as a fighter (that's highly debatable), what wasn't debatable is that it had the legs to take the bombers all the way to deepest Germany, and the P-47 didn't. The other thing that lead to the P-47 being mostly used for CAS work is that it was better suited to that than the P-51. The radial engine and general ruggedness of the P-47 meant it could take ground fire and still get home. If a P-51 got even a tiny hole in the radiator the engine would generally overheat and die before the plane could make it back. None of these things are typically much of a consideration on a typical DCS mission, and so I would expect to see the P-47 used both as a fighter and as a ground attack plane, much as the P-51 is. As someone who loves BnZ planes I can definitely say that I'll be flying it purely as a fighter :) Whether it proves to be good as a fighter is going to depend a lot on what happens with the 50 cals. The BnZ style really requires that brief snapshots have a high lethality, and currently this is just not true of the 50 cals. At the moment even getting many hits from long bursts of 6 50 cals is rarely enough to down an enemy plane. I'm very much hoping that the new damage model will see a boost for the 50 cals, it would greatly improve the lot of the US planes (and I'm a 50/50 allied/axis pilot). Back to the topic at hand, the Me-262. Yes I agree, it'd be good to get the P-47 first. As I've said before, I don't think the Me262 should ever really be allowed on public servers. It would just be totally dominant. As MAD-MM says if you fly it right it'd be an untouchable Super Dora ... and the Dora is already very tough to kill if flown well.

Agreed. It also never reaches the actual max forces on my MS FFB 2, other sims are much stiffer at max. That said I really like the fact that DCS is very light at slow speeds, lots of contrast is good :)

Yeah, I've thought that ... it seems quite similar to the beta 109 without stick forces. Which is to say you maybe wouldn't be able to break the wings in real life because you wouldn't be able to pull hard enough to do it ... but perhaps in the DCS version you currently can. It's a good theory. Does anyone know if stick forces are supposed to be modeled for the Spit already?

Love the energy fighting video IronJockel, really great example of reducing that Spit's energy to the point he had no choice but to wallow in front of your guns :)

Well .. I don't agree :) I love the 190 and have great success with it, it is by far my best plane in terms of K/D. The reasons I like it are: it is the fastest plane on the deck, it is the plane most tolerant of high speeds (even more so than the P-51). It has the hardest hitting weapons IMO. It dives like nothing else, and has the best roll rate at most speeds. It is a boom-and-zoomer's dream. It does however have one rule that I find I need to follow religiously: never turn fight with anything, ever (well there are some situations but they're not common). You can energy fight if you have a small advantage, but if I don't like the fight I dive away and re-position. And I do that a lot. As such I always like to either have a few Km underneath me, or I've just dived down and I'm now flying along like a bat out of hell. The Dora mantra: "Stay fast, hit hard, and disengage when in a bad situation". I agree with Zimmerdylan, the P-51 is the weakest plane IMO. Both German planes are faster low, the 109 is faster at most other altitudes as well. They both also climb better (the 109 a lot better, the 190 a little better) and the 109 turns better. The P-51 has an advantage in high-speed maneuverability and dive compared to the 109, but that's a slim advantage at best ... and it has no such advantage over the 190. I also agree the guns are just too weak on the P-51, and it really inhibits its usefulness as a BnZ plane. It's not hopeless flying the P-51, you can do well with it and people do, but I do think it is the weakest plane.

So I fly for fun, and personally I think a more balanced line-up would be more fun. More fun when I fly German, more fun when I fly Allied. I think when making a sim it makes perfect sense to choose a relatively balanced set from the set of all planes that flew against each other. I don't think very unbalanced situations are as interesting ... after all in DCS you can fly F-15s against 109s, but people generally don't because it wouldn't be much fun. But this is just my opinion, and not everyone shares it, and that's okay too :)

Nope they have their own (really very forgiving) flight model. That said, a P-51 doesn't stand a chance against a F-5E Tiger ... as long as you don't try and turn with him. You are a lot faster than he is (like twice), and climb a lot better (like more than 5 times as fast) .. employ BnZ and take the fight vertical and he doesn't have a hope in hell of getting near you. Turn fighting is not the only way to fight.

Sure. Of course high deck speed is a really nice attribute in a BnZ fighter, and increasing to 75" MP would likely make it the fastest plane on the deck, or very close. A damage boost for the 50 cals should also hopefully be coming, and that will help it a lot too. I don't think it's ever going to be a super plane. Nor should it really, the allies had such an advantage in numbers, and complete aerial dominance at this stage why sink more resources into better planes? However, it would make it a little bit more competitive, which would make things more interesting :)

The higher octane fuel should allow the plane to running higher manifold pressures, which will increase acceleration and climb a little, but the main thing is that it'll increase the top-speed. Which is very useful in a BnZ style plane such as the P-51. However, as you point out it won't do much for the turn rate ... but then turn rate is not the only way to play :)