[Guest]

less fuel makes your plane more agile because its less heavy, nothing to do with ammo.

Now that is a revelation. I've been flying about a year and half and have read about everything I could, but this never seems to have been mentioned anywhere. I thought that less fuel simply allowed for a heavier bomb/ammo load and only affected the flying time. And since most missions I fly are of the short and furious off-line dogfights that end with me getting shot down anyway, having a more agile plane can be a plus point.

This is a very useful tidbit of basic info for which I am very grateful.

This is true only for the game. In real life, fuel was reduced to allow for more ammo/bombs.

This is a very simplistic approach to a very complicated problem. Yes in basic terms the less fuel you carry the greater bombload you can carry. This all comes down to how much lift can an aircraft produce to overcome weight.

Now for the manouevrability part. Weight very much effects it, though in a well-designed aircraft where fuel is close to the center of gravity it may not be noticable. I take an example from cars for now. In an ideal setup, a car should have 50:50 weight distribution in which weight is equally split between the wheels. I used to drive a car that had an auxillary LPG tank in the boot. When it was full the weight distribution was roughly 50:50 and the car held well to the road but when empty I would encounter oversteer (that is the rear end swinging out). The same weight distribution scenario can apply to aircraft.

The best example I can think of is a P-51D Mustang which had a large tank behind the centre of gravity. When full the CoG would be shift behind the pilot making it very difficult to dogfight well as the aircraft responded sluggishly and had a tendancy to spin when pushed too hard. By the time they were deep into Germany and encountered the heaviest fighter resistance the tank was sufficient low that the CoG shifted forward and balanced the aircraft. Another example is aircraft that use wingtanks. Whilst the CoG may be in a favourable spot, the distribution of weight and the force it exerts on the wings may hamper roll rate (and say if the fuel is low and slushing around, definately so). Also you can't forget that the lighter the aircraft is, the less power that is needed to generate lift, therefore more power goes into thrust resulting in increased speed and change in manouevrability.

Now for the game, from what I understand it is fully capable of modelling the effect of fuel distribution on aircraft performance. It does adjust weight as fuel is burnt (therefore you will see some change in responsiveness and speed), but only a select amount of aircraft (modded ones from knowledge) are effected by CoG changes due to fuel. All the modded slot P-51s have this feature and I'm sure many future machine will too.