Originally posted by SlapShot
Thanks for your input on the P-38. I thought it was only me, seeing that no one else has posted on it.
I find that the P-38 wants to stall and/or depart from flight very quickly. I doesn't take much to get the stall horn to buzz and speed was well over 300mph and I was not pulling hard.
Slow speed stall handling is gone. Flip Flop your dead and it doesn't take much to flip flop. And forget about using flaps while at low speeds.
Can't say what Beta version this went south on, but I remember that when the P-38 was first let loose in AH II it handled like a dream after they fixed the roll-rate bug.
I really hope that the problem is that they haven't gotten to what Karnac has pointed out, cause at this point the P-38 is hobbled IMHO.
I do remember you saying something about it one or two patches before I started having problems, and I also remember asking you what you were complaining about. Like I said, it seems to me it began about the same time as the ability to transfer settings from AH I to AH II was enabled. You were right, and I was wrong, at least at some point, although I do not understand why we had such different experiences for a couple of patches.
I agree, the patch that included the roll rate fix had the best performing P-38 I've flown in any flight sim, and it most closely matched the characteristics mentioned to me by Ilfrey, Richardson, Rhiemer, Heiden, Safarik, Capron, and Lloyd, among others, all intimately familiar with the P-38. I was very pleased. It was not uber by any stretch, which it shouldn't really be, but it was a hot ride.
One of the biggest things I noticed lately was a nasty tendency to depart violently to either side when slow, even when diving. It goes rapidly from one side to the other and is extremely hard to correct for. While this happens it will often refuse to regain speed even diving at nearly 90 degrees with full throttle for a few seconds. While it had a reputation in real life as being very forgiving and docile, lately it is anything but.
I've heard a couple say the P-51 climbs faster than the P-38 now which is not right, and someone posted acceleration tests showing the P-38 to be slower accelerating than the P-51 as well. Most data shows the P-38 to accelerate 0.6 mph/sec faster than the P-51. This is between 10K and 15K at military power.
While the brakes have never held on the runway as they should even in AH I, I was hoping they'd fix that, so that it would have the takeoff characteristics it should have. There were very specific reasons for the takeoff procedure, and while you can get up without following it, doing it right is "part of the experience".
