I asked guys in my squadron, the 80th Headhunters, to critique my fight. Here are the responses I got.
From Shuffler:
"I keep my throttle up over the top to carry some e. I come off flaps pretty often when going vert for the same reason. As I zoom up and prepare to roll over I tap a couple of notches to assist getting over. As I come over I judge what he may do next... if he keeps in the turn I kick a notch or two more..... maybe to full. If he takes a long turn like OM did a few times, I may come all the way off flaps or back to a notch or two. It's all about E.
If you had just a bit more e it makes all the difference. Those times he went under you from 9 oclock.... you could have then rolled under (hard left rudder with left aileron) and started picking up his 6. You tried this a couple of time but was slightly too low in E."
From Soulyss:
"I've watched the film a couple times and agree with what Shuffler said about the flaps. You do raise/retract them during the fight which is a step beyond what many people do (and something I struggled with for a long time), but I would be more aggressive in that regard and raise them quicker. There's a couple rules of thumb that I keep in the back of my head, one comes from some TA time with Del here and that's during a fight up = flaps up, down = flaps down. That was really counter intuitive for me as I was doing the opposite but the idea behind it is with the flaps coming in while you're climbing you minimize drag and get every last foot of alt you can before you have to come over the top, on the bottom the flaps help decrease your turn radius which minimizes that forward progression in the scissors. Think of a scissors fight as a race to the back. The other thing I keep in my head is flaps tend to pitch you up a bit, they move the nose. There are times in a fight when I don't need to move the nose, any time I'm not pulling back on the stick, or other wise think I don't need them those flaps come in ASAP. I have those two ideas in the back of my head during a fight like this, the 2nd one trumps the first if I need to move the nose more I use the flaps regardless.
The example from your film that comes to mind is you are at the top of an immelman a few times and you're trying to roll that beast over and get it up right again an example is shortly after the first merge. The nose isn't doing anything here and I would have brought the flaps in, especially cause I'm also guessing you use rudder to help the roll. Between the flaps and the rudder work that's a lot of drag you're adding and in the case of the flaps they're not doing anything for you at that moment.
The other thing I noticed was it looks like you're using combat trim,it's not necessarily a bad thing many very good/successful cartoon pilots use it, however I really don't like it in the 38. In my mind the 38's biggest asset is it's stability in the vertical and at really low air speed, in those conditions I don't like another automated control system making adjustments to my elevators, I find the 38 more easy to control nose high and low air speed with combat trim OFF. I have all my trim buttons and combat trim within easy reach on my controllers and I make small corrections to the elevator trim (only one you need to worry about in the 38) or if I get really out of whack I'll toggle CT on and then off again to reset the trim system and get it close instantly. I use it more in single engine planes because there's more trimming involved what with torque and everything. If you have the buttons to spare I would try flying with it off and see if you prefer it that way. Ultimately it's whatever works better for you."
