A mental excercise

[Kurt]

Here is a flight of fancy to run your brains on for a while...

Excluding the physical conditioning...  Purely from a tactical perspective...

Each of us has thousands of kills over the years, thousands of hours of simulated combat airtime..

If you remove physicality, G resistance etc, it seems reasonable to conclude that many of the players of Aces High would be tactically superior dogfighters than the real people who did it 60 years ago.

I'd like to hear your thoughts about it...  keeping in mind that this is fantasy land...

[WMDnow]

It's possible, but still, many people dont know what a maneuver would 'feel' like, so it would be different in that ways, but i see your point, if we did know what the maneuvers 'feel' like, we would, most likely, be superior.

[Furball]

Without a doubt most people playing this game have more hours playing it than any WWII vet had combat time.

For example... A B-17 crew had 25 missions to complete in the earlier stages of the war.  

Guesstimating that on average, over the course of the tour, a mission took around 8 hours?  that is 200 hours...

Some people in game do that in a month here.

[hubsonfire]

I would think I would have a much more pronounced edge over a WW1 pilot.

[Ghastly]

In some ways yes - but in more ways, no.  

I believe that those of us that have been doing this for a number of years probably have a better grasp - perhaps a far better grasp - on ACM than the pilots of the time probably did (They had a only few minutes of practice to our days or in some cases, weeks).  I also think we are (on average) far better able to judge gunnery than than was probably the norm.

On the other hand, most of us would have to learn a pretty significant amount of  minutae just to effectively operate, control and navigate the aircraft to begin with - and most of us have had little or no preparation at all at dealing with the barrage of important details and still flying and fighting the aircraft effectively.  And almost as bad, we all tend to have formed bad habits that would be likely to have gotten us killed in a real WWII aircraft.  And pehaps worst of all, most of us have never been in a life or death situation, where your opponent plans to kill you if they can.  

When Terror rides shotgun, it can be kinda hard to think straight.

[texasmom]

Originally posted by hubsonfire
not necessarily from our uber skills...

[Lusche]

No matter how many thousands of kills I have in this game   - If real bullets would start to fly around my cockpit, I would panic and forget all I learned in here...

(Not to mention that I would never fit into a WW2 fighter cockpit at all... )

[CarlsBee]

ok you have 1.000 kills and how many deaths?

[Lusche]

Originally posted by CarlsBee
ok you have 1.000 kills and how many deaths?

Next question please...

[WMDnow]

Originally posted by CarlsBee
ok you have 1.000 kills and how many deaths?

If we are better than the original pilots, the deaths would be significantly fewer.

[Krusty]

The physics and world modeling of the game don't matter. It could be AH or it could be the USAF's latest flight simulators. It's been proven that pilots learn how to survive in virtual simulations and can use this to survive in real combat. That is why the USAF devotes a budget to simulators.

Hell, even the US Army has "video game" training simulators (okay, they cost hundreds of thousands of $$, but still!).

It's been proven that giving folks the situations in virtual worlds/realities/simulators and getting those "newbie mistakes" out of the way in safe environments means that the pilot will be more effective when the real aircraft is flown or when real combat takes place.

I believe the USN or the USAF found that after the first 6 missions a pilot was exponentially less likely to damage the aircraft or die during a mission than pilots that learned "in the plane" doing real missions. They started having all pilots do the first 6 missions in simulators (at the time) and losses dropped.

I can't recall when this was, but it was a long time ago.


So, consider that pilots in AH, even though it is a slightly different "flight model" than real life, have hundreds of thousands of cumulative sorties under their belts. Aside from the HO-N-GO newbies, almost every one of us would fare better than the average WW2 pilot.

The average USAAF pilot never saw the enemy his entire deployment.



Oh, and it doesn't matter if real aircraft require minutae, as you'd be trained on the minutae before being allowed to take off. We're not talking "plop them in a seat and watch them die" -- in WW2 they gave pilots training on how to operate the aircraft!!

[Speed55]

Think about the way a "normal" car handles at 100mph.  All we have to deal with is the stearing wheel, the gas pedal, and the brake pedal.

Imagine what it was like diving down on an enemy aircraft traveling 400+ mph.

Now add all the easy controls that we take for granted during the game.  Flaps, engine management, trims, using hat switches to look around, etc.


Imagine  if you sat down at your computer desk, and had like a twilight zone experience, where all of a sudden you were on the runway in your favorite warbird and the sirens were blaring all around you.


I'd say 75% of us wouldn't be able to get off the ground. But if by some  chance of luck we did.  i'd wager that 90% would probably auger, blow up the engine, puke all over themself, or get shot down within 2 minutes of air combat.


EDIT:  WHERE'S THE AUTO TAKEOFF BUTTON!  

[Lusche]

Originally posted by WMDnow
If we are better than the original pilots, the deaths would be significantly fewer.

Ehm.. we don't have to care about "death" in here, so almost all of us fly in a very suicidal way in this chaotic environment.

[FiLtH]

I dont think you can even compare what we do, to the real thing. A basic understanding of what happens when you do a certain manuever, but thats about it.

  Like it was said before..add the terror, and all bets are off. Heck, I dont even like getting up on a high ladder. Say nothing about someone shooting at me while Im up there.

[WMLute]

The REAL question is if you'd HO or not.









(run's away)