Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aircraft and Vehicles => Topic started by: Gaston on August 02, 2025, 02:02:38 PM
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Hello everyone,
I have just (definitively) finished a variant I made based on the Battleline/Avalon Hill game system. It represents research spanning about 30 years.
I tried to add many details and unusual aspects to reflect my findings during those 30 years of research, the most important of which is the huge weakening of firepower at speeds above 250 mph (TAS), which encourages keeping the speeds lower.
Equally important was the ability to turn indefinitely at 3Gs, making endless consecutive 360s, something that became so prevalent in 1944, as early War tactics (inspired by the Spanish Civil War and its hit and run successes, in addition to unprotected fuels, false assumptions about firepower effectiveness, and the turning behaviour of the new monoplanes) gradually revealed the limitations of having a high speed:
1-Hit and Run tactics worked well mostly on unaware targets that went straight. (Something greatly helped by one-way Soviet radios: Gunther Rall: "It was like fighting an apparatus. You took out the tip of the V and the rest milled about in confusion", or the poor radios on Japanese types (something aggravated, apparently, by the Earth's magnetic fields in the Pacific region! See Justin Pyke's interview in "A6M, Zero or hero", Drachinifeld channel on YT).
2-The high closure rate of Hit and Run forced point-blank fire for a sure kill, since an early hit could warn the target to start turning, which would quickly break an overtaking attack.
3-Hit and Run could also be countered by a head to head...
Another aspect I found was that low speed turns benefited greatly from reduced power (some unknown physical property of lower power greatly reduced the turn radius while still maintaining the rate: Radius mattered more for aiming lead in a turn), and by 1945 this was becoming so extreme that when you ask an experienced 1945 FW-190D-9 pilot what power level he used in combat, his response is that he never went outside 50-60% of maximum!!! (0.9 to 1.2 ATA ------------------ over 1.9 ATA available on the FW-190D-9...)
What this power level also implies is that to him combat was synonymous with turning...
https://youtu.be/kOuVqP89058?si=qkVFOR2ZZxvBKChb
13:10: (paraphrasing) "We never used it. There was a notch you could feel to engage it [WEP], but we never went past the notch, and pulled back even from that, as you did not need that much in a fight. The power was usually from 0.9 to 1.2 ATA."
1:3 of the weight in thrust is too much! 1:6 to 1:5 is more like it!!! :rolleyes:
(https://i.imgur.com/XScNgif.png)
Another aspect may seem odd is that I attempted to replicate right/left turn performance differences on types where I felt this was important.
As an example, the FW-190A was extremely poor in hard high G right turns (5G +, and in both directions at higher speeds), but it was actually fairly symmetrical in sustained 3G right turns below 250 mph.
On the P-51 it was different: Hard high G right turns were decent, but sustained 3G right turns below 220 mph were at least 15-20% worse. The coarse granularity of the game makes the difference 50% better to left, which is definitely excessive. But Steinhoff and other accounts do show that the Me-109G, the P-47 and the P-51 were significantly worse turning to the right, a difference of 17 vs 20 seconds 360s being recorded for the Ki-84...
Since most of them turned worse at low speed in the same rightward direction, the relative difference may have seemed small unless encountering a type that had better symmetry, and I did hear of at least a few combat account where the difference in right turns was much more dramatic against those specific types, in addition to the Steinhoff recommendation to always climb to the right against P-47s and P-51s. However this does not often appear in combat, as it seems 85-90% (if not more!) of turning combats were to the left...
Another aspect that may surprise is the relatively poor lower speed roll rate of the Me-109G and the P-51D, but this is borne out for the P-51 by the SETP tests which show a 55 dps roll rate (in a 3 G turn) for the P-51D, when the P-47D was 66 dps under those same 3 Gs. The stick forces in roll were also described as extremely high on the P-51D by the SETP, one turn reversal under 4.5 Gs causing the stick to be wrenched free from the pilot's grasp when the aircraft stalled under that 4.5 G load! Lateral stick forces were described as very high in most circumstances...
The SETP tests were done with full wing ballasts representing wing fuel, ammo and guns, whereas many P-51 displays today have dummy guns, no ammo, and maybe partial wing fuel. That may explain a different look to the displays. And even then, I read one modern pilot account saying he was very surprised at the roll heaviness... He said that even the modest rolls seen at airshows he now understood probably had the pilot working hard!
In any case, I hope a few around here will enjoy what I attempted to do (link below), however imperfect it may be with such a simplified system. At least it encourages you to use low speeds with 1944 types, which is more than computer simulations do!
https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/97109/advanced-air-force