GSholz, no need to get huffy.
With regard to fuel burn, you and Artik brought it up. I agree -- you guys are right. I will be editing the rules writeup to have fuel burn of 1.0. So, that one is solved. Thanks for bringing it up, but there is no need to continue harping on it.
With regard to "Why would anyone do X." In Scenarios, my goal is: maximum realism given a need also for playability. In other words, I want to maximize two things that often pull in opposite directions: realism and playability. Also, there is no mathematical formula that I can solve to get the provable optimum -- I have to use my judgement, which is definitely not perfect. Sometimes I will make the best choice. Sometimes, I won't -- but it is not due to lack of trying, lack of desire, or bad motivations. Also, because such things are subject to judgement, people can have different opinions on what is best to do.
Fuel burn is modified in scenarios to account for the fact that our maps are much smaller than real life. For example, in Battle of Britain, if we don't adjust fuel burn higher, we have 109's with much greater than historical loiter time over England or much longer range into England than historical. So, for increased realism, we increase the burn rate. Some scenarios are like that. This one, as you correctly pointed out, is a different matter and should have burn rate back to 1.0 because there are different dynamics than just map size for Eastern Front.
As for alt cap, that is based also on a desire for realism. I want the style of fighting to be like what I've read about in books about Eastern Front air combat. It is not realistic for Eastern Front fights to commonly be at 38k (which is what would be going on with no alt cap -- for example in Malta scenarios where we don't have alt caps, fights have gone up to almost 40k). There are lots of reasons Eastern Front fights were typically not that high, and some of those reasons, I can't replicate in the arena, so I have to pick some other way to give the same effect. I can't just throw in thick clouds above a certain altitude because all planes in AH have in-cockpit GPS, and so they can use clouds in ways that are highly unrealistic. (One intriguing way that will bear future experimentation is just how visibility works in AH3, where unlike in AH2 you can have real problems seeing aircraft against the ground when you are up too high -- maybe it means we won't need alt caps anymore.)
So, knowing this, what did I do? I bought five Kindle books on Eastern European aerial combat that I could search electronically, with first-hand accounts from Eastern Front pilots both German and Soviet, and spent the time to search all of them for every reference to altitude of bombing and fighter combat. What I found was a very large number of references to low-altitude action. For specific numbers, I found the vast majority of references to combats from the deck on up to about 15k or so. I saw only one reference to a fight above 20k (Guther Rall flying at 19,000 ft, spotting a Russian recon plane at 26,000 ft, and climbing up to shoot it).
Wanting to make the fighting happen at realistic alts, past scenarios have shown one way that works well as judged by the player base -- alt cap. (By the way, in some scenarios, we have no alt caps because either the planes involved can't get up to unrealistic alts or the realistic alts are very high, so no need. Malta is an in-between case. I don't have a lot of references to what typical alts were, so I haven't tended to put an alt cap in that one. As a result, some folks fly at approaching 40k, which has resulted in complaints to me about the unrealistic nature of that. No matter what I choose as a Scenario CM, I get crabbed at by someone, which sucks.)
At any rate, that is the answer to why. It is not to make things gamey or to force it to be like the MA but in fact the exact opposite motivation. It is to make the action more like what we read about in accounts by the real pilots, so that when a player flies in a scenario, the action he experiences is like what he reads about in 1st-hand accounts of typical action in that battle or region. But I have to do it in AH in situations where we can't put in all real-life constraints that caused real pilots to fly at those typical alts.
As to whether this one aspect -- a 20k alt cap -- is the difference between you flying in the event and having fun or deciding not to participate, that is up to you, of course. My long discussion here is not primarily designed to convince you to play (which is your own choice) but, because you brought in a public forum insinuations that my goals are the opposite of what they are in reality, I wanted to be thorough in saying that I completely disagree and why.
