Finally figured out how to work the guncam, and immediately afterwards had one of my interesting 1 v 1 fights in AH.
It was a classic energy fight between a P-51 and a Me109G10, that started around 23k and proceeded from there. Ended up a draw, when we mutually decided to rtb due to fuel, but was still very close for both pilots at several points. Salute to Niklas for such a great fight <S> !!
And for you guys that think the 109 is way too weak, well I sure had a hell of a fight on my hands. I had no clue that the 109 would outperform the P-51 so badly in the 15k-25k alt band.
I got a beautiful film of it.
Click on the link below if you want to download it. Its about 275k ziped and is on my ISP webspace so it should be fairly quick to download.
Film Voiceover/Commentary:
I was flying near the front at 23k feet altitude, when I spotted an enemy aircraft at my level to slightly low 4 o'clock. It was one of the dreaded Me109-G10's !!
I pull hard to meet him 12 to 12 and turned on my guncam. He must have expected me to take the HO shot because he dove under me and immediate went into the vertical.
I didn't fall for it
I instinctively wait a few seconds for him to get committed high into his loop before I myself went vertical. This way I ended up above him when I reached the top of the loop, and used my roll rate to translate onto his six.
Thank god, I won the merge because from here on out, both the pilot and the 109 outperformed me and my Mustang.
Several times we went into chase mode with us both trying to conserve E, speed, or me trying to maintain our contact distance.
Not sure what his fuel loads were, but I was light for a Pony , starting the fight at only 25% fuel, and he still constantly pulled away from me, even with WEP.
Each time he would slowly pull away until he got enough distance to pull it into a vertical fight and try too reverse on me.
We would loop or Hi Yo-Yo a couple of times, with me concentrating on lag pursuit to maintain my angles advantage.
At least twice I got really good shoots, but with my poor gunnery I missed them both. I never noticed any return fire from his aircraft in the fight, but once he almost had a canopy shot on me.
And a couple of times I even took some really poor or long range shots to try and spook him into a bad decision, hehehehe didn't fall for it
Probably the most exciting part of the fight, was when he went into a pure Hammerhead reversal on me. Again, I have died to many good E-fighters in my time, so I knew that I would get a face full of 30mm if I followed him straight up.
Again, I waited till he had committed for a second or two, cocentrating on gaining speed, and then offset my climb to his 8 oclock and followed him up.
It was a test to see who could hang on his prop longest. He won, but I had waited longer, so he stalled first !!. It was very close, and he missed the canopy shot opportunity, by a millisecond.
After that he must have been low on fuel since he just tryed to maintain distance from me and get to friendly territory.
I never could make up the distance difference, and was low on fuel myself.
I SALUTED!! the enemy pilot (niklas) and turned for home.
Great Fight !!!!
Of course he might have saw it a little differently
Download film from this link:
http://web.mountain.net/~arringto/ah/51vs109.zip ------------------
Vermillion
WB's: (verm--), **MOL**, Men of Leisure,
"Real men fly Radials, Nancy Boys fly Spitfires
"
[This message has been edited by Vermillion (edited 12-07-1999).]
