and the A6M5 as a A6M3
no no no no, you are missing the other point. There was very little performace gain with the A6M3. The cliped wing actually reeduced the agility vs the A6M2...the -2 turned better. There was little to no other improvements. The higher horsepower engine gave it better climb etc and a cruise speed at 20k of 341mph, but the A6M2 in AH is ubber which makes up for that. The only thing that AH A6M2 does not have is the extra ammo that the -3 would have.
Yes, give the P-40E only if the Ju-88 is allowed, but no A6M5. The A6M5 is way to much for the P-40E....the A6M5 even hold its own with the F6F...it will eat P-40E for breakfest.......gggeeshhh!
For those of you that dont understand; take a 1946 Piper J-3 cub with a 65hp cont. engine. Get a cruise speed of about 70mph. Replace that engine with a 180hp engine. Your cruise speed will not improve that much but you will get one hell-of-a climber...because I flew one. You still have the high lift wing which still creats a lot of drag. You must reduce the lift along with the bigger engine to get more speed...but with the reduction you may loose a tight turn radius....juast an example. The A6M3 did nothing much other than replace the 940hp engine with the 1130 hp engine. This actually drasticly reduced the flight range.
With the removal of the wing tips, this decreased the turn radius by only a fraction but it increased the roll rate at higher speeds and also increased the top speed and agility in higher speed dives.
Overall, the A6M2 in AH makes up for that. If it were modeled correctly, no one would fly it.
The A6M5 should only have a max dive speed of 410mph. I have A6M2s that do faster than that. Only the A6M5 can recover from that speed, the wings on the A6M2 should rip right off...especialy with wing damage.
Also last but not least; "American pilots knew that virtually any BURST of gunfire into a Zero was likely to distroy it". re: Zero A6M by H P Willmott