I really don't give a damn if you were here first, you're still wrong.
You CAN'T pull all the stick deflection you want in a P-38 and not snap roll, in fact, it WILL snap into an unrecoverable spin. You can snap roll and spin out while pulling straight back on the stick, and the real plane will NOT do that if both engines are running. If it is flying straight, it will NOT stall one wing first, it will simply quit flying and drop nose down. The AH P-38 WILL stall one wing first flying straight, with just back pressure on the stick.
Not only that, the AH P-38, even with two perfectly operating engines, suffers from torque effects in both stalls and spins. You often MUST pull the engines back to idle, and sometimes even shut them down, in order to recover from a spin. That is PURE Bravo Sierra, nothing more, nothing less.
Captain Stan Richardson Jr. USAF ret., was an advanced instructor in the P-38 with over 3000 hours in the plane. His job was to teach P-38 pilots to fly on one engine, to do advanced aerobatics, and to recover from stalls and spins. He took pilots up and taught them to force a P-38 to stall and spin. And he said FORCE was the word to use. In over 4 years of correspondence he has said repeatedly that you should NOT have to do ANYTHING to the engines to recover from a spin. Far from being ordered to avoid stalls and spins, Stan taught himself how to FORCE stalls and spins, and how to recover from them.
According to everything Stan has told me, not to mention Art Heiden, Don Rheimer, Bill Capron, and any number of other P-38 pilots, the P-38 spin model is completely wrong.
Oh, and it is easy to test the flaps. Go find the pilots manual and the test pilot data, and then fly the plane to see if it matches. The test pilot data reports and the pilots manual will tell you the speed at which the flaps can be deployed, and will also tell you what the stall speed is for each notch of flaps is. If you can duplicate that performance with the AH plane, then that is all the testing you can do. That tells you whether or not the flaps add the proper amount of lift.
The biggest single problem here is the expectation that U.S. planes should have the same stall and departure characteristics as the Axis planes, and that is simply wrong, for a very obvious and important reason.
Simply take a look at the basic design of the planes, and the thought process behind the planes.
With the possible exception of the P-51, U.S. planes were designed to be larger and heavier, to provide a rugged airframe. The solution to the added weight and mass was more horsepower and more directional stability.
The U.S. planes were designed specifically to be more stable and forgiving, at the cost of maneuverability. This makes them mush out before they depart in a nasty manner.
The Axis planes were designed to be light and agile, to have greater climb rates and be more maneuverable, they were designed to dogfight. They sacrificed directional stability in order to make the plane more maneuverable. This makes them tend to depart with a great deal less warning, and earlier than they would if they had more mass, more intertia, and more directional stability. They will be far less forgiving to any error in pilot input, no matter how slight. They also require the pilot to be much more attentive to catch the plane at the first hint of a departure.
The more maneuverable you make a plane, the less stable it becomes, because maneuverability comes from the lack of stability that allows a plane to make fast transient directional changes.
The problem with a less stable plane is that when it reaches the edge of its flight envelope, it becomes far less forgiving, and far more prone to spin out and snap roll.
As far as the P-51 and the P-47 responding like a P-38 at those speeds and under those circumstances, that's a crock. At least half the time I engage one of those planes and get them into a slow turning fight I'm able to easily break them down into a stall followed by a spin. And I'm a lousy pilot in AH.
A lot of U.S. fighter pilots I have either talked to or read the books and reports from have specifically mentioned exploiting the tendencies of Axis plane to depart or at least become unstable as speed dropped or maneuvers became more agressive. Bud Anderson and Erv Ethell come to mind rather quickly, as I remember Bud mentioning several times how he'd get a 109 to try to follow him in his P-51 knowing full well he'd get the 109 to depart sooner, and he could roll over and shoot him as he spun out. It was a favorite tactic of Erv Ethell in the P-38 as well. Both scored multiple victories over German planes specifically exploiting the exact thing that seems to be the complaint here, Axis planes being less stable than U.S. planes. Go figure.
