What moves did you do an 'Figthertown USA'?
Just about everything I do in AH (and most of the 1-on-1 moves I read about in Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering, by Shaw) except losing control of the aircraft (although I don't do that often in AH either).
I agree that the basic moves would apply, as well as the basic knowledge... ie how do do a barrel roll etc...
but.....
Unless you were hanging on your prop 200 feet above the ground, and taking extreme risks... I stand by what I said.
Hanging on prop in a veritcal persuit included, but just not taking it all the way into a stall.
1) If you managed not to to auger, you would probably vomit all over yourself, as the engine rolled your ride and swung the nose down.
I think I did auger (virtually) once by going through the "hard deck" (an altitude they specify as being "the ground"). I didn't vomit, but I felt nauseated at times -- interestingly mostly when the instructor showed me some moves and I wasn't flying, and my nasea would go away or lessen when I was flying, even in aerobatics. My flying also included a brief blackout when the instructor came hammering back to base then slammed it into a more-than 6 g turn off the end of the runway (to scrub off speed) then right into a final (just like how I go in to land in AH, by the way) without letting me know he was going to do that. Since I didn't know he was going to slam it into such a turn, I didn't tense up and blacked out in about 1-2 seconds. I know it was more than 6 g's because when I came to, the g-limit beeper was beeping away and had to be reset.
2) The physical strain of pulling Gs frequently and often doing post stall acms, would force you to stop.. (blurred vision, disorientation, extreme fatigue), After a good 1v1 DA fight, my wrist hurts, can't imagine what thats like on my body if I did it in real life.
4 g's are not bad. 6 g's are some work, and over 6 can black you out quickly if you aren't prepared for it (or at least that's how it was for me). You don't pull more than 6 g's in AH dogfights much either. I had 4-5 dogfights and was fine.
3) As stated before, the rudder in AH is surprisingly effective. I have not flown a 109K4 in real life, but in AH, I can make a 109 fall sideways keeping the nose almost level, using the rudder. I can also, snap the nose up, at or just above stall speed, and then move the stick to the back-left corner to cause a upside down controlled flat spit which can be exited by giving more throttle, all of which would be suicidal in real life.
Or what about the Spit cartwheel move, where the airplane tumbles erratically? Sure, if the airplane was made out of super strong materials that didn't exist in WW2, but, I bet if you tried it in a spit, you'd ruin the airplane, and possible cause it snap its tail..
I almost never do stalls during my fighting in AH. Very occasionally I'll try it as the last thing in my repertoire once I've already basically lost the fight and have nothing left. It rarely works for me, as it just kills whatever energy you have left and loses you some altitude. I don't usually find it being all that effective when used against me either, but who knows -- maybe there are masters of it out there. I'm not saying I've fought everyone in the game, and I'm certainly not the best pilot in AH. I think of it as a desperation defense, not an offense like good management of E.
If we are talking about real airplanes and real combat, weird stall moves were used in a tiny fraction of real WWII fighting (tiny meaning approaching zero percent, but not exactly zero -- you can read an account of a pilot using it here and there out of the thousands of other accounts that don't involve it), and different planes handled that sort of thing differently (like in AH). Maybe it would have worked in the Marchetti I was flying at Air Combat USA similarly to some model of aircraft in AH, too.
Anyway, my point is: If you are good in AH, you will have no problem going up in a prop plane and being proficient in ACM with it. If you are a 2000-hour real-life pilot who has no ACM experience or know how, an AH'er (even if he has little time in real planes) will clean your clock in a dogfight in real planes.
This to me means that AH compares very well to RL airplanes in the realm of interest -- dogfighting in prop planes.
