Wow, I RoFLed seeing this is still a subject of debate after YEARS of being a subject of debate. As often as it comes up, and as often as HT has always made tweaks to the various flight models, one would think if there was a specific problem with the Corsair, it would have been addressed by now.
I have to agree... I think "by the numbers" the F4U itself is probably modeled about as well as possible, and I doubt that it can be rendered too much more accurately with what we have available to us today.
Actually, there's something the real Corsair could do that ours can't: The flaps were controlled by a spring, so if you set one or two notches they could blow up and drop down on their own as airspeed changed. So at least for the first two notches you wouldn't HAVE to manually manipulate the flaps...
That's what I was referring to here.
In RL, the simple fact that the pilot would have to let go of the throttle to move the flaps probably meant he only moved them a notch here and there. Now, the F4U did have "blow-up" flaps that he could set at say 2 notches, and they'd automatically fluctuate up/down dependent upon speed. But what are the chances he'd go beyond the two notches? Or that if he did, that he'd continuously tweak them up/down to fine-control his plane? I can't believe that happened much at all...
Simply letting go and moving his hand from one place to the next would have taken time, and made it unlikely he could keep up with the "adjustment" pace I keep in my fights. Would any experienced AH pilot claim that timing doesn't matter much? That losing a few fractions of a second here and there won't effect the outcome of a fight? That those lost fractions of a second won't effect the success of a maneuver? That they won't make a "possible" maneuver practically "impossible"?
I'd tend to argue that the "convenience" and ease-of-optimization the flap system gave the pilot when using only one or two notches likely resulted in extremely rare in-combat manipulation of flaps that deviated from those settings. It undoubtedly made it easier on the pilot to use one or two notches, but less likely that he would stray from that to have used 3, 4, or 5 notches.
And if he did, it would have once again been a completely different beast than we have in AH.
I'd also point out that while that may have been "convenient", I for one don't really on the AH "auto-retract" flap feature, but quickly raise my flaps to minimize the drag imposition when I want to transition to faster flight. That's something else that would have once again been more difficult and time-consuming to do in RL.
Sure, my flaps blow up unintentionally all the time, and that's arguably more inconvenient than a spring system would be in those instances. Overall though, the AH pilot has a clear advantage when it comes to manipulation of the flaps (and all other control devices, practically simultaneously) than a real pilot would, and that leads to a much more "fine" level of control than could be maintained in reality.
