Basically you are all for added this or that unless you decide you don't like. As stated previously in this thread by people who have experience with engines, aircraft, maintenance, etc. the factors you want aren't a consideration unless:
1) Poor maintenance
2) Environmental conditions
3) Poor production quality
4) Equipment wearing out and no supply parts handy (which is why battle damaged planes were cannibalized)
All of these are factors that actually are the root cause of engine failure or equipment failure. Running an engine at military power, for a 30 minute window is not.
You say you don't want to simulate it since it is a combat sim. However, to be a true combat sim you would have to factor in those things. You would also have to factor in sleep deprivation, malnourished, effects of illness, etc. on pilots to actually simulate the environment you want.
Instead you have stated you made a game play decision to ignore these factors. Well at least the oil engine heat up factor and the flight time to target factor because you don't want to deal with that but just deal with combat. Yet those factors effect the machine and pilot during combat so by your quest for a simulation you must factor those and not skip them.
The real world conditions are the rub that everybody actually are discussing. How do you deal with them? Can you deal with them?
You could right code that randomly causes a engine or mechanical issue. But it would be random since you can't actually track and say player Y has flown plane X for 1000 hours. Even if you did track that would be realistic since in that time player Y might have died or loss his plane 500 times. So it makes it very difficult to track plane usage and applied variable for wear and tear.
Next different theaters had different rates of maintenance quality, supply resources, and environmental factors. For example the Aleutians had I believe the highest loss rate of aircraft. But this was do to the environment and maintenance issues.
So we are back to having a code randomly throw mechanical failure at your. Again EM doesn't come in since you have to write code that randomly throws things at you to simulate the effects of poor maintenance or not overhauling an engine that has been flown at military power for X hours.
As for factory fresh or no production issues. Many people have brought that up in the past. The Ki-84 performs as it was design to. Not as it actually did in combat because production quality is not factored in. Same goes for other planes such as the Brewster. The B-239 Finnish model performs well because it is a different variant than what the British used in Malaya or the Americans at Midway. Other threads deal with the exact differences. Another difference is that the Finns had very few planes, had excellent pilots, and concentrated their resources on keep the planes they had flying. While in Malaya the British pilots were not experienced, the ground crews were not experienced or familiar with the Brewster model they had, and they definitely did not have an adequate supply of parts. All of these factors (as Widewing, Squire, and others in different threads) impacted the performance of the Brewster model used there.
So again you come down to simulating combat but without the parts you don't like. Supply, maintenance, sleep, food, illness. All of these effected pilot and plane performance. Also you state to skip over the things you don't like such as sitting on the runway waiting for the oil to heat up or the flight time to target. Those also effect the combat because you have to factor in pilot fatigue which was a real issue.
The effects if engine management are dealt with over the operational life of an aircraft not in short combat hop.
As stated you could write code that randomizes mechanical issues (degradation of engine do to abuse and poor maintenance, gun games, ordinance not working .. torps and bombs failed to work early one, etc.) but Dale has made a decision that this would not actually benefit game play. Simply put you up, you fly 15 minutes or more to a fight in the MA, you line up on an enemy plane and press the trigger get a few rounds off then nada. How much do you think the player will like this? Same goes for almost any mechanical failure. Say you are in Ki-84 and go into and maneuvering hard but within normal limits while chasing and enemy plane. Then the randomize decides your plane has been of poor production quality and you have a structural failure in one of your flight surfaces and bam kiss dirt because of it. I would hazard to say you would very quickly kill off your clientèle because they can't predict when it will happen. Who wants to spend time online only to have a random event take you out to simulate environmental degradation of your plane, or production quality, or lack of spare parts, or the fact that the plane is simulating being shot up and repaired X many times, or lack of ground crew, or poor maintenance, etc.
Those are the things that affect the aircraft and whether there are mechanical issues or not. As stated by those such as Widewing, who have many hours of real world experience, a well maintained plane would not have the issues you are discussing. Those issues come about because of an accumulaton of various factors over an extended time period.
Running the engine at military power would not cause what you think it would unless those other factors came into play before the virtual pilot even got into the cockpit. Without a way of modelling that it becomes just a random occurrence that would produce more negative consequences than positive since the player would not have any advance warning they were flying in worn out plane. If they did what stops them from not taking off and spawning until they get a plane in better condition.
You have what an hour in a Texan where the pilot let you fly it? Yet you are trying to tell several people who have 100s if not more hours of flight time that your experience is as valid as yours. You also have people who have direct knowledge and experience with maintenance issues but again you insist you who have no experience in this area are right and they are not. You have MODed an existing game and are trying to equate that with the experience of a person who coded not one but two flight sims from scratch. Not modified somebody else code, or skinned something, or used existing flight models to create new flight models. A person who design the whole kit .. damage model, energy, physics, etc., etc. not once but twice.
However, I'm out since it is like debating somebody in a different language. You are presented evidence and opinion from several people who have direct real world experience. Yet refuse the acknowledge this or the possibility they might know what they are talking about. You are asked to actually site examples and you don't. At this point I think you are just trolling and stirring up things up to get a kick out of it. So I am out.
