Let's make something clear right off the bat. A lot of factors will determine how much force a pilot will experience.
An aircraft's roll response and rudder authority play a large part. If an aircraft has excellent roll rate and response, then even a small amount of control movement might seem like you are yanking the stick. And the faster your aircraft is moving when this happens the more the response is to your controls. The same is true of the rudder. If it has a large surface, it will produce better response.
The pilots relation to the CG will have some effect as well.
You cannot compare a 190 to a Mustang. They will not throw a pilot around with the same force even if they do the same maneuver at the same speed. It will have similar results, but different Gs.
Based on my experience that would not be realistic.
What is your experience?
A snap roll is a violent maneuver and it can throw you around like a rag doll if you are not wearing a shoulder harness or your cockpit isn't skin tight. A normal roll, if done sharply will also throw you against the side of the aircraft but the intensity of force would depend on the roll response of the aircraft at any given speed. Neither are life threatening jolts, but strong enough I doubt there's a man alive that can sit up straight and keep his head or body still.
Shoulder harnesses weren't in all aircraft in ww2 so many did not have that additional stabilization and not all cockpits were as small as a 109 or Spitfire.
Could you elaborate on that a little more please. I don't know of any aircraft that is capable of pulling extreme Gs just with the use of the rudder.
I didnt say anything about pulling Gs with just the use of a rudder. Using the rudder doesn't increase or decrease the amount of Gs an aircraft pulls (unless you factor in drag which isn't relevant here.)
Using a rudder
changes the direction of force. If a pilot is accelerating forward the he experiences force from front to back until acceleration stops. If he pulls back on the stick the force goes from top down, relatively. If he kicks the rudder, it's from side to side, relatively.
Obviously the vertical Gs have the ability to reach dangerous extremes. My guess is, any rudder use or spins that result in horizontal Gs would likely be less than 3 Gs. A jolt from a flak burst might exceed that if close enough.
If you are in an aircraft that is doing 300 mph and you kick the rudder while holding the wings level, it would be like a car making a 300 mph turn on a flat surface. NOT the same number of Gs, but a significant number.
In AH we do these things all the time. We use extreme amounts of rudder in tight turning, high G, 1v1s as well as other situations, hence my statement "...if it were real..." We would be kicking full rudder at anywhere from 130 to 200 mph maybe more and it's going to throw you around a bit.
Those types of fights were "fights of a lifetime" to the majority of ww2 pilots and relatively rare. But it did happen and they were violent, not comfortable, coordinated joy fights.
And none of this even takes into consideration the turbulence you would encounter while flying in the wake of an enemy aircraft and the bouncing around that can make it hard to keep your feet on the pedals without locking your body up and draining what little energy you have left.
If you ever get a chance to talk to any WWII pilots ask them how they used their rudder in combat. Sure some maneuvers require for your aircraft to be uncoordinated but most of the time you want to use enough rudder (not full rudder, but just enough for what ever you are doing). The reason most people in AH don't use rudder is because we don't have too many people receiving proper instructions on how to fly.
Using rudder at all is a mostly instinctive act unless you are constantly looking at your turn and slip indicator. NO ONE does this. And several factors can throw the coordination of an aircraft off. Wind, improper trim, drag, or just bad coordination.
I think it is quite rare that anyone is so well coordinated that they can keep that ball in the tracks all of the time even if they are looking at the indicator. And in a dogfight, no fighter pilot is going to be looking at his turn and slip.
But the point was, in a hard, violent dogfight like we experience on a regular basis, you would not be in coordinated flight most of the time. And if any pilot in ww2 got into fights like ours, with lap belts but no shoulder harness and a nice roomy cockpit of a Jug or Mustang his head and body would be all over the place.
Sometimes when your uncoordinated you do feel those forces pulling you to the side, but an aircraft is not a race car, it is simply incapable of generating such high side Gs to slam you into the wall.
I think you are way overestimating the amount of force it takes to throw you side to side. We are talking 1 to 3 Gs here. It is not a break your shoulder or crack your skull slam, but it is violent, sudden and partly uncontrollable.
An experience aerobatic pilot will anticipate the forces on his body and counter them with his muscles, but no aerobatic pilot in the world will ever achieve the level of stability our cartoon pilots have without the help of restraints that were not available in WW2.
And the majority of pilots in ww2 were not "professional" aerobatic pilots. Most were green and had barely enough hours to make them proficient pilots. They likely wouldn't anticipate much of anything that happened to them in combat.
I'm not really familiar with how flak bursts effect air pressure, I mean I know the general idea but I don't know how significant that change in pressure would be. Would you know of any numbers to help us discuss whether or not the effect is significant enough to add it to AH?
Tell your kid to unexpectedly set off a couple of M80s in the floor of your car while you are driving with the window rolled up. Then tell me you dont cringe, blink, or lose vision and concentration for a split second.
It's not all about the pressure. The shock and violence plays just as much a roll.
That acute awareness everyone was talking about earlier in this post comes from knowing you are in a dangerous situation. It does not come from, nor is it constant if an explosive device goes off in your vehicle. That kind of thing causes disorientation which most of the time results in distorted vision and momentary confusion and it is well documented.
In case no one else has mentioned it, the OP probably got his idea from other flight sims. IL-2 does model the head shake much more than AH does but still not realistically. And I think Warbirds models some disorientation. Just FYI
