Let see we have people who actual military aviation experience commenting here. We have people with actual multiple hours of flight experience here. We have those who are citing actual combat reports and pilot experience of world war II.
Then we have stiglr who has said a pilot allowed him to fly a texan for a while.
As pointed out by people with experience actually flying military aircraft and other aircraft. Abuse of an engine from running at military level will not lead to a castarophic failure in minutes. The damage done to the engine accumulates over time and is dealt with by the ground crew. AH does not cover this aspect. Simply put spawn a plane and it is in best condition. Therefore unlike say the SW Pacific where you had maintence issues where you did not have spare parts or engines had to keep using the engine as long as you could basically you have a fresh engine here every time.
Therefore failure do to accumulate abuse or wear and tear on a engine does not happen in 15 minute to 30 minute window.
As people pointed out failure does not even occur normally in several hour window with a brand new engine or well maintained engine. The percentage change of failure increases over accumulated time do to wear and tear and pushing an engine past its limits. Or do to poor maintence, a difficult environment, etc. in combination with engine life conditions / usuage.
Aircraft in several theaters had plane performance degraded by maintence issues, environmental issues, lack of parts issues, etc. ... the Aleutians, Libya/Egypt, Greece, Malaya, Southwest Pacific, etc. are only a few areas where various aircraft did not perform to publish specs do to these issues affecting aircraft.
You also had production quality issues that some planes suffered .. most notable in late war Japanese planes. On paper their performance was impressive. In real life a few performed up to spec, many didn't because of poor production quality.
All of these issues are not modelled in AH. Instead you take up a plane and it performs like it just came from the factory. When you land you don't respawn in the same plane but respawn in a new plane. If you die you respawn in a new plane.
So in the MA most combat hops last what, 30 mins? Not hour. Not weeks. Not months.
Per those with actual hands on experience this issue will not cause instaneous degradation or degradation during a historical combat mission of a new plane or one that has been well maintained with not tons of performance hours on but could result in the ground crew cursing you out and having to rebuild your engine once you got home. Also pointed out by others the attitude was that planes can be replaced but an experience pilot can't be replaced quickly.
So actually what you would need for engine maintence to play a factor is:
1) Model production quality
2) Model the quality of how the crews that put planes together in the field. Malaya, Crete, Burma, China, etc. all had issues with receiving planes but then assembling them.
3) Modeling quality of the ground crew maintaining planes
4) Modeling the availability of spare parts
5) Modeling the affect of the environment (humidity in Pacific, cold in the Aleutians, sand in the dessert, etc.)
6) Modeling the actual operational life of an engine from first delivery to the point it is shot down. Meaning you would have to track how many hours your put into a specific plane.
At this point you can start talking about engine wear and tear since you factor in issues 1 - 5 then you can factor in engine performance hours.
But you would also then need to factor in other things logically. Such as if your engine needs to be overhauled then you can't fly for X time.
If you lose your plane you don't have to worry about the engine of that plane. If you die then you shouldn't be able to fly for X specific period of time.
But to some up the accumulated affects of engine wear and tear by running it full blast simple does not come into affect in the time period of a half hour. The longest missions we see are not in the MA but in special events where a person might being flying a plane for 1 hour to 2 hours.
So the arguement is silly since we don't model the issues I stated above.
