I checked my stats and found I was 40/16 in the flying PT. Dale gave all of you non-atending folks a major break since there was no way to fly AND fire at the same time. When you manned the guns you did not even have rudder control. We tried taking up gunners but the modeling was incomplete (or something) which caused serious stuttering of the graphics, made it a real slide show.
Some details of the FM...
You could accelerate from 0 to 400 MPH in about 10 seconds, regardless of gravity. You could decelerate from 400 to 0 in less time than that. The throttle seemed to me to be an on/off switch (although others claimed there was SOME room in between). 400 was the top speed (no airspeed indicator). At 50,000 feet the world dissapeared (no altimeter either).
There were only a few techniques that worked well. One was to accelerate upwards just out of gun range and then stop, you could se the chasers hanging on their props trying to catch you while you fed them 40mm potatoes from the Bofors on the stern. The other was to fly up within 50 feet of a guy and stop, then quickly jump into a gun and paste him as he turned away. They were easy to park inverted over and enemy base and used as deathstars, but parking them in the air made them fodder for any GVs or aircraft. I made a couple of runway passes upside down in an attempt to vulch but the 400MPH thing made the gunnery angles pretty tought to hit with authority.
It was fun, better than some ECMs in the past, but there may never be another captain ICI. This could have been so much better if we could fire 'from the cockpit'. But it was only two hours, and only happens once a year.
