Yep. There are good nights and there are bad nights. Nothing strange about that. It not only depends on your personal state, but also on the rest of the arena... what people are online, what fights are going on.....
If I have one of the really bad nights in the Main Arenas and feel i get frustrated, I usually head to DA with someone or TA (depending on aspirin supply handy
). I guess with the new setup you could also try another time period for a change.
Flaps: they add additional lift to your wing and keep your nose high at low speeds, lower your stall speed but add also drag to the plane. In other words: they help you fly slower but cost you speed (Energy). This is something you have to weight against each other when deploying flaps in a fight - is the additional lift/instand turn rate worth the loss of speed and sustained turn.
How much flaps you have to use depends very much on the plane youre flying and the opponent that youre fighting.
When im in a Hurricane, i try to keep flaps up as much as possible - i dont really need the tighter turn against most opponents and they do cost me a lot of speed i cant afford. Only when im fighting other Hurris or A6Ms (and sometimes against Spits) do I use flaps extensively. I DO use them to help me over the top in slow loops and sometimes to tighten turn when diving throttle idle in a SplitS onto someones tail.
When im flying a F4U, ill use flaps a lot earlier and a lot more. F4Us also have more then one notch of flaps and so called "combat flaps" that deploy at pretty fast speeds already. Their turn performance in close fight benefits a lot of the use of flaps.
I always use full flaps on landing, to lower my landing speed and also keep the nose up on touchdown.
