Echo38

A number of years ago, both of my hands were seriously injured and required surgery. They never really healed well, and I've had problems with them ever since. As a result, I cannot use a joystick to any significant extent, because of hand pain. In DCS, I can fly the A-10C a bit with joystick, if I take it easy, but even two minutes at the controls of the P-51D has my hands hurting. However, I find CAS quite boring; dogfighting in WWII birds are where my heart is. So I've been out of flight simming, for the most part, for several years. Every so often I give it another try, but it never lasts long now, because of the bum hand. I'm not willing to lower the difficulty options, because if I'm playing an arcade game, then I'm no longer interested, and so the hand is moot. I'm also interested specifically in guns-only dogfighting, which makes things trickier. (BVR combat in jets doesn't have nearly as high of a hand workload as dogfighting in WWII fighters, so I could probably handle this, if I were interested in that sort of thing, but I'm not.) Recently, a friend recommended to me the game War Thunder, because it doesn't require a joystick, letting the mouse emulate a joystick via relative control, which it does very well. However, the game itself is not a high-fidelity simulator by any stretch of the imagination, and, although I'm happy that I can fly in it with my bum hand, I'm naturally disappointed in the lack of fidelity. Which brings me to my point. I've tried flying with mouse in DCS, but the only option I could find was for absolute mouse control, and this is a no-go for several reasons. Firstly, absolute mouse has a much higher hand workload than relative mouse, because you must constantly lift and drag the mouse with absolute (you never have to with relative). Secondly, it's impossible (because of said lifting and dragging, which causes a "gap" in your input) to hold a smooth, steady, precise turn. You'll always be going well over or well under max alpha, or whatever speed you're trying to turn at. So, can anyone help me with this problem? Is there any way to configure DCS (preferably without using mods, if compatibility is going to be an issue, because I use DCS exclusively for multiplayer dogfighting) to allow relative mouse control, i.e. treating the mouse like a joystick, instead of the absolute mouse control you get by default if you bind the mouse to the control axes?

Going by the bit outlined in yellow, it sounds like the pedals do not move throughout the maneuver, because the pilot is holding them in a single position. Keeping a roll coordinated involves moving the pedals at different points in the roll, even at a constant stick deflection, because of gravity.

Unfortunately, I don't have the document, but somewhere I've seen a memorandum authorizing slightly higher boosts (a few inches higher than factory, not as high as the latest ones) for the regular fuel. As I said before, even without the special higher-grade fuel, they sometimes set the engines to a higher WEP rating, and accepted that they were wearing the engines more, because the combat advantage was deemed worth it. If anyone knows anything about this document, that'd be helpful. At this point, I'm feeling a little lost, because it was so many years ago, and I foolishly neglected to save many of these document scans that I saw on various web sites.

Unrelated to that discussion, but still may be useful to the development team: Republic P-47D-30 Longitudinal Stability.pdf

If it were up to me (which, of course, it isn't), we'd have commonly-used "middle-of-the-road" ratings—no extremes, but a reasonably close match for the opposition—rather than taking either the lowest (what our P-51D has now) or the highest (some of which aren't certain to have been commonly used in combat). It's been about ten years since I was really into examining this stuff, so I don't remember the numbers for the the P-47, but what I do know is that each of the "Big Three" (P-38, P-47, and P-51) went through this, with the original boost rating out of the factory being relatively low, and then higher boost ratings authorized later in the war, often due to the availability of the higher-grade fuel. However, even when the better fuel wasn't available, higher ratings than the factory one were often used, increasing combat performance at the expense of engine life & reliability. For the P-38J & L, the factory setting was 60" @ 3000 RPM (~1600 hp.). Later, officially-authorized settings included 64" @ 3200 RPM (~1720 hp.) and 66" @ 3200 RPM (~1780 hp.); I don't remember for certain if the 70" @ 3200 RPM setting was officially authorized, but it was used. The highest I'm sure of is 66"; I have a scan of the document authorizing & recommending its use in combat, although I don't remember who gave it to me. I'm attaching it to this post, along with everything else I have which is at all relevant (although I do not have all of the documents that I've seen scans of--yes, I'm kicking myself here, ten years later). Note that some of them are preliminary flight test reports, which doesn't necessarily mean that those ratings were used in combat, and others are merely engine tests, which may or may not have been performed "under load." Here's what I have. Unfortunately, I've never had the opportunity to visit an archive in person, or anything of the sort, so I relied on what other people have made available on the Internet. No idea now where some of these came from, although most of them are watermarked as being from Mike Williams's site. (There are eight files here; four PDF and four image files.) supplymemo-11july44.pdf ppf-20june44.pdf 24june44-progress-report.pdf cti-1659.pdf

Our DCS-level aircraft are exquisitely modelled, of course, but they aren't entirely complete, nor always entirely accurate. For example, engine idle behavior is not currently modelled in the WWII birds, virtual pilot head limitations are not accurately modelled (i.e. the virtual head/camera is allowed to go through the canopy when it is closed, allowing you to see things you would not be able to in real life), enemy aircraft are unrealistically audible over the sound of your own ~1800 hp. engine, and so on. As good as the sim is, it's a WIP. I don't know if pitot tube error is modelled or not; the sim is detailed enough to model such things, and it usually does, but there are still some of these things which haven't been addressed yet. I'm hoping that, after the last of the five scheduled WWII fighters is released, the team will have a bit more time to go back and look at some of these things, but right now, I'd wager that they've got their hands more than full.

Some aircraft had the pitot tube located in a position where the airflow through it was unusually altered by an unintended source. For example, the P-38's pitot tube was too close to one of the engines, and the propwash was affecting the tube, causing the ASI to display a very incorrect airspeed. Hence calibrated IAS. IIRC, there's a chart in the P-38 handbook with a table for calibration. I think this is what Crumpp is talking about with PEC.

Only fought at factory boost rates? What are your sources for this? Even if that is true, bear in mind, it doesn't alter the indisputable fact that the factory WEP horsepower rating was lower than the average WEP rating for the P-47D, overall. (The lowest ever set on a P-47D for combat missions, even, unless I am grossly mistaken.) Given that the factory-boost P-47D is going to be outclassed at normal multiplayer dogfight altitudes, why would you oppose the P-47 being given a higher, more normal, historical WEP rating? Why do you people want the P-47 to be an underdog, when it wasn't in reality? I have little choice but to assume that there exists a bias on the part of those opposing the simulation of the P-47D's historically-common higher-than-factory WEP hp. ratings (which still would not cause the P-47D to outclass the Me 109K, except perhaps at the highest of altitudes, where combat very seldom occurs in multiplayer). Heh-heh, yes, there's no doubt that all of the flying games thus far, which have had a P-47, have portrayed it to fly like a pig. However, that isn't where I'm basing my impression. I've seen quite a bit of real-world data on this, back in the day; IIRC, the real P-47D, at factory WEP ratings, was slower & worse-climbing & worse-turning at low and medium altitudes, compared to a well-maintained Me 109K. And that's going to be a problem in the sim, given that the well-maintained Me 109K is the 109 we will be always facing. There's no good reason, therefore, from the point of view of someone interested in a maximum-fidelity simulation of these aircraft, as well as from the point of view of an honest competitive virtual dogfighter, that the P-47D shouldn't be given it's historically-accurate higher-than-factory horsepower ratings, to make up for its disadvantages in speed & dogfighting characteristics at normal multiplayer altitudes. Everyone wins; it's historically-accurate, and it's more fair & even. The only people who have anything to lose by this are those who, while flying German airplanes, selfishly wish their opponent aircraft to be inferior to their own. I recall hearing that ED was planning on, or at least considering, implementing the higher-grade fuel at some point, after all of the WWII fighters were completed, but that's going to leave quite a long time when the P-47 is the underdog. Hence my concern. I have no problem in an aircraft being the underdog, but only if it was really that way in reality (e.g. the F4F) and there's no way of minimizing the problem without breaching the fidelity of the simulation. But that isn't the case with the P-47D; it wasn't an underdog in reality ('coz higher boosts were used), and there is a way of minimizing the problem of {it being an underdog in the sim, 'coz lower boost was chosen}, without reducing the fidelity of the sim. Therefore, I see no legitimate reason for anyone to oppose that.

In a server where the fight always happens below 15,000 feet (because often no one but I will climb above that altitude), when I'm in a ship that is slower, climbs worse, and turns worse than the enemy fighter between 0 and ~25,000 feet, then my ship is, in fact, outclassed, and knowing its advantages and disadvantages won't change that. In this situation (and others, such as when the enemy took off before you joined the server and is already higher--with his ship which, recall, also climbs better and is faster, as well as turning better, meaning that you can't get above him unless he lets you and can't stay away from him unless he doesn't see you), there is no way to effectively play this bird to its strengths in a manner that the enemy pilot cannot (even without exercising more skill than you) fairly easily counter. An inferior airplane cannot beat a superior one without an advantage elsewhere, and in multiplayer servers (as with real life), it's just as likely to be the superior one that has that added advantage as the inferior one, because many of these external advantages cannot be ensured by skill. For an example: numbers--the enemy team is just as likely as your team to have more players, on average, and so it can easily be you who is the one with the disadvantage in numbers (in addition to the disadvantage inherent to your under-powered airplane). Another example, which bears repeating: altitude--if your opponent joined the server before you did, he could be high above you by the time you took off, and so it could thus be you who have the altitude disadvantage, and may I remind you that the P-47D at factory boost (bearing in mind that this was, historically, lower-than-average WEP rating for the P-47D, and so not an appropriate match for the Me 109K) does not climb as well as the Me 109K at low and medium altitudes?

{Hoping that the enemy doesn't know what he's doing} is not a good strategy. If the enemy does his job as well as you do yours, and there are as many of them as there are of you, you're going to lose if you're in an inferior ship. If your ship can't out-climb, can't out-turn, and can't out-run the enemy, you're in an inferior ship. You can't even disengage, all else equal; he's faster, remember? Above what altitude does the factory-boosted P-47D gain an advantage in any of those areas over the Me 109K? I seem to recall it being pretty damn high ... like 30,000 feet or so, no? As I've said before, most people online prefer not to spend 15 minutes climbing after every fight. Aside from being boring, it causes the rate of learning to plummet, because of the low ratio of combat to non-combat. So, telling me that I need to fly better (or bring more friends), so that I can beat people who are in a better airplane, isn't reasonable. Why the hell should I have to lose, even when I'm flying just as well as the other guy, just because my favorite ship in the sim is outclassed at normal multiplayer dogfight altitudes, because it's modelled with a lower-than-average rating for its model? : /

I do have faith in Yo-Yo & co., but I also know that a big part of the reason why the P-47D wasn't outclassed by the Me 109 in the war was that they usually clashed at altitudes far above our standard online-multiplayer dogfight altitudes, and the real P-47D often (usually?) ran at higher-than-factory WEP ratings. Take away one or both of those factors, and we have a problem. Still, I suppose there's always mission editor-enforced fuel-mass loads, although that'll be useful mostly for duelling.

That's all very well and good, but it leaves us Thunderbolt fliers in the cold when all the action's on the deck and we have no choice but to stay 20,000 feet above the fun in order to not be outclassed in practically every way by the 109. Heck, dive down to 10,000 feet to take a peek and you can't even run away if you get bounced, 'coz you're even slower down there, right? It gets lonely up at 30,000 feet when everyone else is trimming hedges, and that kind of altitude advantage doesn't matter much when all of the enemies are at an altitude where you can't out-climb, out-turn, or even out-run them. The P-47D is my favorite of all the aircraft currently released or planned for DCS, but I have great doubts that it will be at all viable in the kind of dogfights that usually happen in multiplayer servers, which is very sad. Aside from the ground-pounders, I think the Thunderbolt is generally going to find itself a hangar queen, given the clear superiority of its opponents at normal online dogfight altitudes. If they gave it its historically-common higher WEP ratings, that would change, but as long as we're stuck with the factory-default lower WEP rating, I think the "Jug" is gonna be in trouble.

Ah, but at what altitudes, though? This can make a big difference. Some of these birds, their performance curves even leapfrog each other at different altitudes; I think the most crossings I've seen was four! (Faster at low alt, slower at low-medium alt, faster at high-medium alt, slower at high alt--supercharger stages and stuff, you know.) When it's like that, you have a close match. But when you have one of the other examples, where one is hugely faster at low altitude and the other is hugely faster at high altitude, that can get tricky in a multiplayer flight sim. Due to the nature of how long climbs take, and how most people (even hardcore simmers) don't want to spend 20 minutes out of combat after every crash, combat tends to occur somewhere around 10,000 feet (~3000m), on average, in a multiplayer flight sim/game. Perhaps even as low as 5000 feet, if it's an "quick action"-style dogfighting mission with the opposing airfields close to each other. This is the problem I'm worried about for the upcoming P-47; I'm concerned that, the great majority of the time, in multiplayer, the P-47 is going to be completely out of its element (which was high altitude) and thus effectively outclassed. This is especially likely to be problematic if the P-47 doesn't get its late-war WEP ratings (which, I believe, it's going to need far more than the P-51D does; the P-47 has a much higher weight than the P-51, and thus is even more reliant on power for its maneuverability). I've spent too many long, lonely hours alone at high altitude while the fun was had by everyone else at low altitude to not be worried about this.

I agree with that. My question is more academic; it never really occurred to me to wonder how much work it was & how often they removed & added them, and so I'm naturally curious now.

This is true, particularly regarding bomber escort missions. I wouldn't be surprised if many P-51D's never had their bomb racks removed at any point. However, not every mission was a long-range escort mission, particularly toward the end, when the Allies had territory in France close to the target areas. And the P-51D had a very high internal fuel load (the longest internal range of any mass-produced single-engine fighter of the war, I believe, and longer than the P-38's as well). So my question is, does anyone have solid information on whether or not the bomb racks were added & removed based on mission profile? How big of a job was the adding/removal thereof, anyway? Thanks for the links. I'll check them out later; perhaps they contain an answer to my question.

There has been for many years a worrisome problem in the flight sim community: some people become so attached to an aircraft (or a nationality), that they begin to believe that "their" airplane (or their nation's aircraft) was "the best," and they begin to go about reinforcing that belief by any means necessary. I've seen it cause some of these people to completely lose objectivity, to the point where they'll argue themselves into knots and deny anything which suggests that their bird was anything but the best. This happens on "both sides;" I've seen fans of German aircraft do it, and I've seen fans of US aircraft do it, and so on. In some extreme cases, people are even intentionally dishonest because of their vested interest, as competitive gamers, in convincing the developers of flight sim/games that "their" aircraft was better (and/or its primary opponents were worse) than actually was the case. They want to win in the multiplayer sim/game, so they urge the developers to make their airplane better relative to the opposition, knowingly using false statements & putting a spin on facts, and fight tooth & nail any honest attempt at determining how things actually were, unless it happens to match their preconceived ideas (which it rarely does). Don't be one of those people, folks. We don't need that here, in DCS. Leave that for the lesser games which aren't about having the most faithful possible recreation of these magnificent aircraft. We should, instead, be urging the developers to continually improve the accuracy of the simulation (as high as it already is, there's always room for more), and when an aircraft is to be introduced which was an opponent of our favorite aircraft, we should be hoping for the model and/or historical configuration (e.g. horsepower rating) which is the most fair & even and/or historically-representative match for our favorite aircraft, not hoping (because of a selfish desire to win more in multiplayer battles) for a configuration in which the opponent aircraft is inferior to our own. The latter mindset, I dare say, is unsportsmanlike & intellectually dishonest; it is unbecoming of anyone who loves WWII fighters, and has no place in DCS.

Crumpp, you generally make well-reasoned and informative posts, so I expect better from you. Don't play games with me, please. You know, as well as I do, that a P-51D running 72" is much better than a P-51D running 67", all else equal. It does not take an aerodynamics expert to immediately understand this—and IIRC, you are an aerodynamics expert. I can only assume that you're letting your love of the German fighters (which I share) cloud your objectivity. Don't. The norm for U.S. fighters in the last year or so of the war was to run the higher boost pressures. Even when the higher fuel grade wasn't available, higher than factory boost pressures were often used. It wore the engines out faster and increased risk of engine failure, particularly when the ideal fuel wasn't available, but the increased performance often meant the difference between life and death in combat, so they did it. I feel sure that you already know this, because you've done at least as much research as I have. I've seen scans of wartime documents authorizing these horsepower ratings for combat, and I'd be surprised if you haven't, too. So, the 67" P-51 that we have in the game is essentially the worst P-51D that ever saw combat. (Not literally, as a badly patched-up one near the end of its useful combat life could be significantly worse; I mean, rather, that our WEP rating is the lowest of the ones authorized & applied to P-51Ds for combat missions.) The average combat P-51D was set for a WEP of somewhere around 70–72", hence my statement: the average historical P-51D was better than the factory-spec P-51D that we have in the sim, because the former had a significantly higher horsepower rating. Even if (and, as others have pointed out, this is a point of debate) the added speed from the extra horsepower were entirely cancelled out by the added drag of the racks, you must note that more horsepower doesn't only mean better climb rate; it also means better acceleration and sustained turning ability, as well as lower stall speeds. Drag from wing racks may offset (and even more than offset, depending on how much of each) the extra horsepower for top speed, but not the maneuverability (climb, sustained turn, and acceleration)—not when we're talking about this large of a horsepower increase. If the added power + added drag cancelled each other out for top speed, but still resulted in a climb rate increase, then it must have also resulted in an acceleration & sustained turn increase. Top speed is a lot easier to cancel out with drag than the other factors, because drag is much greater at top speed than it is at best climb speed, best turn speed, and near the 1G stall speeds.

I very much agree with this; however, bear in mind that the average P-51D historically was better than the factory-spec P-51D that we have in the sim, because of power ratings & fuel types and such. "Nerf" the P-51D by modelling it to the lowest performance it ever officially ran seems sure to make it "an underdog" versus the 109 which it was "roughly even with" with the P-51D's historical "buffs." But, I suppose I must reserve judgement on how the two compare in the sim until I have had a chance to fly both, if ever.

Unfortunately, I've been forced out of flight simming indefinitely, because of my old hand injuries, but I'm still very much in love with DCS, despite being unable to fly in it. I watch from a distance, so to speak, so, no, I can't say with certainty that the P-51D can't keep up in a fair duel against the Me 109K, but the thing I keep seeing people say is that the 109 is the significantly better dogfighter at normal multiplayer altitudes. I know from prior experience that this has been the case in previous (lesser) sim/games which featured some facimile of the two airplanes, and although I would never base my perception of reality on those other sim/games (which had far lower standards of fidelity than DCS, which itself is still not perfect), they at least sometimes were "ballpark" in their portrayals. Then, too, it does seem to match my (admittedly limited) knowledge of the two real aircraft; I would expect a real Me 109K, well-maintained and well-flown, to out-fight an equally well-flown P-51D below 20,000 feet, if that P-51D were using factory spec WEP power settings rather than the later-authorized ones. However, again, I can't say for certain whether or not, in our sim, the Me 109K is more able than the P-51D at low and medium altitudes, because I've never flown the Me 109K, having been forced to quit simming before the 109's release. But that does seem to be the consensus, that the 109 is the better dogfighter, and that's how it was in the older games, and that's how I expect a real (ideal) 109K would do against a real (less ideal) P-51D at low alt.

I suspect it has to do with the currently-incorporated fuel being the closest to what is run on the surviving examples today. From that point of view, that of a sim developer choosing the model & fuel which best matches the real-life example they have access to for reference, this was a good choice. From the point of view of a competitive virtual dogfighter, however, it blows, because one of the airplanes has a large advantage over the other at "normal" multiplayer dogfight altitudes. That's no good for competitive dogfights, and although enforced fuel-mass loads can serve as a workaround, it would have been nicer to have a more even match (especially because, in this case, it would also have been more representative of the historical average!).

Even so, the DCS Me 109K is closer to its most ideal example than the DCS P-51D is to its; as a result, at the altitudes at which the great majority of dogfights occur online, our P-51D doesn't seem to stand much of a chance in a dogfight against the 109, unless the P-51 pilot has a large advantage in an area other than the aircraft's actual performance (such as his own skill, or a numerical or altitude advantage, or such). That's the consensus, yes? This is not an accurate representation of the comparison between two average examples of the two fighters, historically, nor how it would be if each aircraft were portrayed in its most ideal state which still was common enough to see a thousand or more combat missions. Furthermore, this problem surely will be even more severe with the soon-to-be-released P-47D.

Do you have any source for this at all, or is it an assumption?

Are you sure your virtual head isn't intersecting the canopy glass? (This is a long-standing bug with the P-51D.) It looks to me like this is what that is. "One of your (virtual) eyes" is inside the canopy and the other is outside. Of course, it isn't binary, but a gradient ... In this case, I believe it only occurs on the right side because your virtual head is, by default, closer to the right side of the canopy than the left, 'coz of the right-of-center gunsight.

Here's a video of what happens when an F-16 tries to taxi on short grass: Granted, he was going pretty fast, hence the nosewheel collapse, but the problem of the nosewheel digging into the ground happens at any speed, hence the heavy jet fighters being unable to move on dirt. (Russian jets tend to have beefier nosewheels, as they were designed to have greater capability in this regard, but U.S. jet fighters were designed for concrete/metal runways only.) As someone else pointed out, with WWII fighters, they're much lighter (and have a much better [tire area]/weight ratio) than an F-16, and so they can land on short grass or wet sand, but even these will flip over when trying to land in tall grass, which is why RL training sources for fighters such as the P-51 and Me 109 instructed pilots to land wheels-up if they had to land in tall grass or water.

That sounds like gyroscopic effect, not P-factor. Pitch motion resulting from a yawing motion would be gyroscopic effect, right? As I understand it, gyro effect means that a change of pitch while under power (single-engine prop plane, of course) will cause a change of yaw. P-factor isn't about pitch/yaw change but rather about pitch/yaw amount. Gyro effect is proportionate to the rate of pitch/yaw change, while P-factor is proportionate to the amount of pitch/yaw angle. Isn't this so?