Ok.. it's American History Lecture time.
Please locate the nearest crucible of salt grains to ingest while reading the following:
The reason the P51 isn't picked on or put down by those that choose to place blame on the airplane modeling/performance is simply because all Americans have been taught by Hollywood that the P51 won the war for, not only the USA, but the entire combined allied forces. This is ingrained from our very first exposure to WW2 aircraft and perpetuated in our culture by a very popular performance automobile.
The P51 Mustang is an integral part of our culture. It can't possibly be a bad thing.
LA-7s, however, didn't exist until AW and AH came out. We Americans never heard about it, so it must be fabricated. It can't possibly be that good. All the Soviets ever did was copy our airplanes, nuclear weapons, and enslaved their people. How could they possibly have an aeronautical industry capable of producing such a good airplane? No.. it simply can't be, so the modeling is wrong. ( the author was even guilty of this belief in his younger years ).
Nikki. What a farce. Everybody knows the Japanese didn't have any aircraft worth a darn after the Zero. It's obvious, since our mighty US Navy massacred them from the skies at every opportunity.. after Midway, of course. There is no way that a documented fact that the Japanese spent no considerable effort to actually TRAIN the pilots they stuck in those birds, would yield such a discrepancy between the planes historical performance and it's virtual lethality. Obviously, the plane is modeled all wrong.
Brewster. Again, all good Americans who are up to date on their aviation history know that this bird was a sentence of death to anybody who had to fly them at Midway. There is no other version of the plane..anywhere. Finnish Air Force? That's just the line a the end of a race, right? C'mon.. you can't improve on American Engineering. Obviously, this plane, too, is modeled wrong.
Now.. after you clean the dripping sarcasm off your monitor, I think you'll understand a lot of the underlying opinions about certain aircraft. I know the first time I encountered the Niki in AW, I was demoralized at how well it did. Shook my historical confidence to the core.. to where I discovered how little I really knew about how aircraft performed. Keep in mind, I had lived WW2 aircraft from grade school ( we had these things called Libraries.. they had books.. we read books. Spam was something mom served for dinner. And getting booted was something that happened when dad didn't feel like sending you out to the woods to find a switch ) and these fancy-dancy flight sims didn't show up until I was 30, or so.. I already knew everything. Accepting these alternative histories doesn't really set well with some.
However, I still don't like the LA-7..
