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Howard Mitchell -> Re: Thoughts (1/2/2003 9:39:12 PM)
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by decourcy
[B]
1. Vals and Judys. why do they have the same Mnvr? I would rate the Val at 23 and the Judy 25 at least. Maybe because at 23 the Vals get shot down to easy?
Many people (including game designers :D ) assume that if a plane is a newer model it is automatically better than the previous. Also the corollary is sometimes true...
2. Ki43-II's. Why does the much improved Ki43-II have a LOWER Mnvr?
This plane should still have the low durability of the Ki43-I but should have an armour factor of '1' . The new Hayabusa's had a higher speed, better armour, and several minor refinements
AND still managed to keep the Maneuverability of the first iteration.
I would rate the Ki 43's a 34 Mnvr and a 35 Mnvr respectfully.
I wish people could forget the 'Japanese planes had no armour' line and rate the planes on their stats and history and not on preconceived notions. Believe it or not the early allied planes had no armour either!
F4F3's? virtually no armour. Do you think that 2 extra M2HBs dropped their speed 13mph? not! It was mostly armour weight. Early P40s? no armour but they were known for toughness.
TBD's? no armour. (at least the early productions)
I love how tough the P51 is in these games; Its a late war plane so everyone asumes it was as tough as nails. Not! The P51 was known for being a bit delicate.
That said i think an answer for the 'Zeroes are being slaughtered by Allied bombers' problem would be to increase
their durability to 24. or so.
Flying gas cans aside, Zeroes were commonly considered to be tougher structure wise than the Ki43.
3. Mike Wood (I believe) made the comment about the Ki61 being a poor copy of the Me109. That is a popularly believed intelligence failure during the war. Even a company as reputable as Janes made the mistake when the war started of saying that Japan was not capable of building a modern aircraft and their best aircraft were purchased castoffs from Europe.
The Ki61 program started with an air ministry specification in December 1939 for a general purpose fighter. In December 1940 Takeo Doi started detailed design work on what eventually became the Ki61. The only comparison to a European aircraft that would be accurate is the the Ha-40 liquid cooled engine is a direct licence build of the Daimler Benz 601. The design of the aircraft was completely Japanese.
To make a long story short the early production Ki61-I was tested against a Ki43-II, a P40E, a LaGG3, a Me109E3 and a Ki44. The Ki61 was found to Maneuver better than any of those aircraft other than the Ki43, and the Ki61 was tough, an excellent diver, had no bad flying qualities and was quite fast for a Japanese fighter. It was judged by Japanese army pilots to superior to all of the tested aircraft.
The Ki61-I KAI-c did not enter production untill January 1944 so the version in the game is incorrect. Probably the armament combination in the game should be 4-12.7mm Mgs. It is true that 388 Ki61-I's were armed with 2 Mauser Mg151's bought from Germany but the majority were 4 .50cals. in armament.
I believe that the Mnvr rating on the Ki61 should be 34 or 33 with the 2 Mauser cannons as they did not fit the wings that well (a problem that was fixed in the Ki61-II).
The one problem this plane had was main bearing failures in the Ha-40 engine as it was built for a less extreme climate than New Guinea.
But that was a problem that was hardly confined to the Ha-40 engine.
I am hoping that some of the more obvious of these inaccuracies can be fixed or that someone creates an editor for aircraft and ships.
Michael Johnson [/B][/QUOTE]
I didn’t reply to this one before as it takes some looking up and a bit of thought. Michael raises some good points.
Firstly, the maneuver rating includes an element for aircraft speed, it does not just equate to the ability to turn tightly or perform aerobatics. This is why the late war fighters, which were predominantly energy fighters rather than maneuver fighters (on both sides), have higher ratings than early war aircraft.
Secondly, whilst some aircraft ratings are objective, such as maximum speed and range, others are very subjective, such as durability and maneuver. I play flight sims as well as strategy games, and the CFS2 forums are usually full of people disagreeing over which was the better aircraft.
Val vs Judy
The D4Y (Judy) was considerably faster and had a better power to weight than the D3A (Val). However the D3A was more maneuverable, having about 2/3 the wing loading of the D4Y. Perhaps the designers would say that these arrive at the same rating, but I agree with Michael that the D4Y should be rater higher.
Ki-43-II
One of my favourite aircraft this one. The Ki-43-II actually had a higher wing loading and lower power to weight ratio than the Ki-43-I, the benefit was an extra 21mph of speed and presumably better altitude performance due to a two-speed supercharger. I would agree that the maneuver rating should be swapped.
I don’t think the Ki-43-II rates an armour value of 1 though. As mentioned above, I think this equates to self-sealing fuel tanks. I have never come across a reference to the Ki-43 being hard to set on fire, and the self-sealing fuel tanks of the contemporary Ki-44, also by Nakajima, are described as ineffective. If anything I would REDUCE the durability of the Ki-43-I to below 22 as it was of even lighter build than the A6M2.
P-51 and Ki-61
A convention of fighter pilots in 1944 was asked to assess the armour of US fighters and ranked them in the order P-47D, F4U-1D, F4U-4, F6F-5 and finally P-51D. It should be remembered though that the P-51’s fragility was only in comparison to other American aircraft, it was still an immensely strong machine The P-51D had an empty weight of 3,232 Kg, the Ki-61b empty weighed 2,210 Kg. This suggests that the P-51D was more solidly built, and included thicker armour, than the Ki-61b.
In terms of maneuver rating, I agree it should be increased. The Ki-61 was one of the few Japanese aircraft which could give the P-38 a run for its money and so 33 or 34 seems fair.
I have just finished reading a history of the JAAF ('Japanese Army Air Force Fighter Units and their Aces, 1931-1945' by Hata, Izawa and Shores) which mentions that only a very few cannon-armed Ki-61s made it to New Guinea in December 1944, so the game should model the MG armed versions.
How much of the above affects the game? Very little (though for WITP it is a different matter). P-51s do not appear, and I don’t think D4Ys do either (never got that far). I agree it would be good to have an editor which could allow us to change aircraft ratings.
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