I don't know where the total CG is relative to fuel CG..
I don't know if there's less authority from having more fuel fwd than aft (overall, regardless which specific tanks we're talking about), but what I have no doubts about is that the right side of the equation (ie the right side of the = sign) means getting rid of aft fuel first gives you a
net improvement on agility.
Describing it.. The plane feels more docile and predictable.. You can more easily coax it into much better maneuvering performance (maybe fool proof enough way to measure part of it could be sustained turn trials - the character of what I'm talking about's immediately apparent in even most basic acm like flat scissors). The departures are softer, more forgiving, more usable. You can recover spins more easily, and spins feel less like they've totally
broken away from controlled flight. You get less of that feeling from the tail where it's like you're towing a trailer and if you treat it wrong it just derails and then it's you that's being towed by it into departure. Exactly those departures that Krusty and others mean, where for
seemingly no reason the plane decides to quickly go from slight sideslip to out-of-control yaw departure.
With nothing left but ~10-15min of FWD fuel (or wings, but personally I like FWD better because the forward
fuel CG is indistinguishable to me, while the roll rate bonus
is noticeable) the plane feels so much more like it's meant to be. Not just in terms of weight burden but aerodynamically.
The interference of that tail weirdness .. whatever it is exactly, in strict and accurate aerodynamics and physics, resolves itself when you lose the AFT fuel.
And.. You'd think that you can "cheat" by taking a DT because it's further forward than at least the AFT tank. I only got around to try it near the end of playing AH and all I can say is it's definitely better for maneuverability than AFT fuel.
But you do feel slightly more roll inertia and aerodynamically it's a penalty - although IMHO if you're after max maneuverability, speed's probably dispensable - and also unless you know the plane well enough (ie ~ 6mo to a year's worth) it'll be hard to distinguish the CG benefits amidst the extra weight of the fuel. Because at this point (25 or 50 + DT) the CG benefit really is almost on par with fuel weight malus.
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So clearly this is all very subtle stuff. So what's the big deal? The big deal is that the further you get up the competitive ladder - in the pure performance sense, regardless whether you actually do any competitive events or do the score/rank thing - the smaller are the margins that people compete over. Another racing analogy: if you're 15 seconds off pace at a competitive race, it's easy to find the first 10 seconds, harder to find the next 2-3, and then it's orders of magnitude harder to get the next 1/2 seconds and yet another couple orders for the very last few tenths and hundredths of a second.
In Aces High that's no different. And just like in racing where a tenth or two per corner adds up to as much as a whole second in a whole lap, in AH every little fraction of a second and of a degree and every yard given or taken adds up real quick to winning/losing life/death difference.
The extra agility that the 152 gets from max fwd fuel CG, independently of how "realistic" it is or indeed of what the actual physics are, that subtle extra agility is
easily as large as the margins for succeeding/failing to make the decisive shots that the 152s
flight envelope allows (emphasized because the two go hand in hand - we're talking about the specific shots that the 152's specific ACM allow). For all its extra maneuverability and lesser roll rate, it's still by and large a Fw 190. You usually can't hang around for more than a couple of knife fight revolutions.
Its specialty is still (30mm) snapshots and the higher the relative speed they happen (esp if you're still >50% fuel) the bigger the multiplicative effect of any bonus/handicap to agility. The 152 is already as cumbersome as it is, so smoothing out those wrinkles in the envelope is a
major factor in pilot comfort and confidence on top of plain machine performance.
Not very well written but I'm toast from a long week and didn't want to keep putting off reply
TLDR: the full range of effects of fuel CG is pretty subtle, but the least subtle effects are easily noticeable in most basic ACM. Not least of which, the type that tend to trigger those nasty spins.
