[ACE-OF-ACES]

Let's look beyond all of the graphs and numbers for a moment (...)

Ok... remember that its opinions and tastes of each pilot, not hard facts.

Exactly

Once you decide to ignore the graphs and numbers you have nothing left but a multitude of opinions.

And as we all know

Opinions are endless

This opinion based world is where all the problems with regards to realism stem from. That and the inability of people to take pause for a moment before blaming the flight model and take a look in the mirror and consider the possibility that the reason the plane does not act like the stories they have read is due to their own flying skills or lack there of as opposed to an error in the flight model.

But I digress

The point is just because a combat pilot stated that he in plane A was able to turn inside plane B does NOT mean plane A could outturn plane B under equal conditions in a controlled test

To put it another way

For every 109 pilot that said he was able to out turn a Spitfire, there is a Spitfire pilot that says he was able to out turn a 109

(...)
Show me papers and graphs and whatever...It still isn't right.

Whats this? Now you want facts? :roll:

You have to see that what we do in IL2 is beyond what WW2 pilots did, we push the envolope quite often and for many seconds, they couldn't (G force) and wouldn't (fear of death), perhaps at that level P51's would still fly like a charm, with flowers and stuff.

Exactly

We do things in this sim that a real pilot would never dream of doing

Thus I am not surprised that we 'see' things that real pilots never mentioned

It is nearly impossible to say how a plane should act in a 'dynamic' situation

In that they hardly ever tested these planes under 'dynamic' situations

Thus there is hardly any real world data to refer to

There is some for some planes

But typically only the planes they noticed problems with

For example the P-39 is one of the most tested planes of WWII because they had so many problems with it

And take the P-38 compression problem

There is a lot of test reports on that

Problem is some see that and leave thinking the P-38 was the only plane to have compression problems

Truth is they all had the problem

The P-38 was just one of the first they noticed it on because it was one of the first to go that fast to notice the problem

So you will be hard pressed to find any real world data on the 'dynamic' attributes of a plane

One thing they did do often was to describe how the plane acted during a stall

The test pilots would purposely put the plane into a stall and than attempt a recovery

And than make a verbal report one how the onset of the stall felt and how to recover from it

Some planes would shake just prior to a stall giving the pilot some warning

Others would not

Some planes had typical recovery techniques

Others required more, like applying opposite rudder to the spin

These are the types of things you can gleam from test pilot and combat pilot reports

But you can NOT obtain relative performance FACTS from combat pilot reports

Because as I noted above

Combat pilot reports don't contain enough information to re-produce the scenario and you have no idea of the state of the other plane and pilot

That is to say all you can gleam from a combat pilot who stated that he in plane A was able to turn inside plane B is that the relative pilot skill of pilot A to pilot B and/or relative energy state of plane A to B was such that plane A was able to turn inside plane B for that specific case

Nothing more

With that said

As for FACTS

The FACTS are the changes UP made to the HSFX P-51s flight models made the UP flight models less accurate. That is to say the UP P-51 performance values do NOT match the real world performance values as well as the original HSFX 4.1 flight models do. I am currently working on my web site where I will post these results, once they are done I will post a link here for others to see with their own eyes how much error UP introduce to the P-51 flight model with the changes they made