or here is a snippit
pyro says
"
Erg, I think the accounts you're talking about are referring to emergency power which is a much bigger deal than military power. There you are really talking about running the engine at its limit. Like on the aforementioned P-51 where they talk about exceeding military limits as a long term maintenance concern rather than an inflight concern, it's not the same case with WEP. You have to snap a breakaway wire to get to WEP and log the numbers of minutes at WEP after the flight. A different maintenance procedure has to be followed after the flight.
I would like to see a reason not to use mil power so much but I don't want to blow up or damage your engine for doing it. I don't buy the assumption that it's realistic, because it's not realistic as I've already outlined. It's arbitrary. Yes, there are instances where you turn to arbitrary solutions, but I don't view this as one. So that takes us back to an original idea that we couldn't get working well and left half abandoned, and that is a good fuel consumption model. But now we have it working like we wanted it to and can make it a central feature. That's a big difference. Grab a P-51 manual and setup some cruise conditions in the beta. You'll get the right speeds and the right fuel consumption at the various altitudes and cruise settings.
Engine management lies in the throttle and prop controls. People chase red herrings like mixture control, supercharger control, etc., in the quest for more complexity, but the shocking revelation is that designers didn't want their planes to be complex and eliminated any pilot load they could. To get an insight into how manufacturers and military brass looked at airplane systems design and the capability of the average military pilot, I highly recommend reading the transcripts of the 1944 Joint Fighter Conference published by Schiffer. Look at the P-51 and look at all the systems that people request. Mixture- automated. Supercharger- automated. There was manual override, but this was to do ground checks and the switch is spring-loaded to the automatic position. Cooling flap- automated. There was a manual override for this, but that was in the event of a malfunction with the temperature sensing circuit or something. As pointed out, even the Germans didn't want to deal with requiring the pilot to make separate prop adjustments from the throttle. If anybody is really hot and heavy on this subject, do yourself a favor and plop down $10 a pop for some flight manual reprints and re-examine what you think is necessary to the model. Like I said before, I once was in that school of thought but found a lot of my assumptions to be incorrect."
