I had to put my gameplay on hold due to slow work recently, and haven't witnessed some of the drastic maneuvers that were mentioned in another thread.
I DO remember way way back when, in the early days of AH, a certain pilot (I can't recall his name, too many years gone by) that would wait til you got into firing range and split S and get away or distance himself with the maneuver enough to force pursuers to restart the chase. I recall some of the better sticks in the game at the time getting frustrated if not downright ticked off at seeing it happen..throttling back to try to stay with him never seemed to work. Jugs, Corsairs, Spits, 109's, 190's............didn't matter what the pursuers were flying, you could not match the B17 split S. You would black out trying, and meanwhile, he would have opened up the range to 3 or 4K again.
My point is this: Weird flight performance and maneuvers from buffs have been in the game about as long as I can remember. Whether by design, for gameplay equality or something, I have no idea.
Only "questionable" thing I saw recently was a set of B17's hitting like 340 or 350 mph at 33K or more, and according to the film, not descending to gain that speed. I broke contact and went out of range so can't tell you if they help that velocity for any length of time, but it was strange seeing it.
I do wonder if the higher alts reveal buggy things in the flight models. I remember an issue some years back where the TBM would hit over 400 mph at high alts..........I believe it was like 450+. Someone sent in a film of it and it got fixed pretty soon afterwards.
