And here you point out exactly what Im saying. IN THE GAME, not as duels or in any books,
Dueling is part of the game, last time I checked. Anyway, if you want to assert that the Pony is at least as good as most other late war planes at dogfighting, then you need to demonstrate that it can win dogfights with them with equal pilots at the controls, starting from a neutral merge. Such duels would remove the variables of pilot skill and situational advantage, and leave it purely to the attributes of the plane to give victory or defeat.
It is not logical to say "The Pony is a great dogfighter because I saw a great
pilot defeat an inferior pilot who made multiple mistakes in his own ride."
With a good player at the controls the pony it is a great plane.
Again this is illogical. A mediocre plane with a good player behind the stick remains a mediocre plane. They cannot alter the plane's physical attributes as modeled by HTC. They can use what they have better than an unskilled player can. If the other player makes gross enough mistakes, the more skilled player can take advantage of them to win even in greatly inferior rides. This does not change the relative quality of the planes. Moreover, it logically follows that however lethal a very skilled player may be in a mediocre ride, they'd be even more lethal in something else that is superior. That is certainly the case with the Pony. Hand BigR a P-47M, a better-turning, faster-rolling, better-accelerating aircraft with heavier firepower, and the opposition would be deader even quicker
YES I can out turn NIKS,
The N1K has a smaller turn radius and a better rate of turn than the P-51D, both instantaneous and sustained. You absolutely cannot out-turn a N1K in a P-51D unless 1. You have altered the game to make your P-51D turn better than the physics HTC models allow for (which I don't believe is the case) or 2. The N1K pilot makes a mistake, the most common of which is excess speed while trying to turn due to poor throttle control. Have you ever heard of something called corner velocity? If the N1K pilot is in excess of both his own and the P-51D's corner velocity while the Pony is nearer its own, the P-51D may indeed (briefly, until speeds bleeds off for both planes in the fight) have a tighter turn radius and a better rate. But this does NOT mean you defied physics and somehow made a P-51D turn tighter than a N1K can, it means the opponent screwed up badly and made his N1K turn worse than its potential! The necessary corollary to this is that a N1K pilot who gets out-turned by an opponent in a P-51D will lose even more quickly and certainly if they switch planes and go at it, because the P-51 is decidedly inferior to the N1K in turn performance.
YES I can turn faster at speed than MOST 190s
Define "at speed". A Pony and a 190 over about 300mph IAS are both above their corner velocities. This means they can pull to the 6G AH blackout limit without trouble. The laws of physics state that two airplanes pulling the same Gs while going the same speed will have the same rate and radius of turn, no matter what kind of airplanes they are. If this were not how it works in AH, then Hitech would be modeling the laws of physics incorrectly.
But he does model them correctly. Thus the only way you can literally "out-turn" a 190 while both of you are going 350mph is if you have altered the game (which I do not believe is the case) to make your cartoon pilot withstand more Gs. However, it is far more likely that the 190 gets out-turned because (once again) it is way over it's corner speed while the P-51D pilot manages his speed better and is thus closer to corner.
It should also be pointed out that the 190 series airplanes are practically the only single-engine fighters worse in most parameters of turn performance than the P-51D. Thus if both are you are managing your planes equally well, you SHOULD win a turning fight with a 190, due once again to the laws of physics. Thus your example doesn't argue whatever point you're trying to make (It's difficult to tell, you define things so vaguely), but said example is another good example how the physical attributes of an aircraft define its performance.
That said, the 190D9 is superior to the P-51D in every parameter EXCEPT turn performance at typical MA alts, almost all other late-war fighters in the game are superior to the P-51D in turn performance, and most of them are equal or superior in power/weight at typical MA alts as well. Therefore, logically speaking the P-51D is mediocre as a Late War dogfighter
BigR got all those skills using a "mediocre" plane because he KNOWS his pony and the other players proved they didn't know theres as well.
I watched the film. Again, *most* of what it demonstrates is that superior gunnery can often render the attributes of the plane moot. And the rest of what it demonstrates is that superior skills can make up for inferior plane performance.
Relative pilot skill level and relative aircraft performance are two separate issues which you insist on conflating.Your argument is essentially "A very superior pilot in a P-51 can kill an inferior pilot in X aircraft. Therefore the P-51D is as good an aircraft as X aircraft." And THAT is what we call a non sequitur.
An equivalently fallacious example would be an expert marksman saying "I can shoot a handgun as accurately as most people can shoot a rifle. Therefore handguns are as inherently accurate as rifles."
You either don't understand what I'm saying or refuse to accept what Im saying. Again I should know better than to try and have a conversation with someone who is obviously NEVER wrong and can't possibly see anyone else point of view. Thanks for playing.
I don't know if anyone can understand what you are saying, since you are vague at best and often conflate two entirely separate issues, such as mixing up relative aircraft performance with relative aircraft performance. You attempted to argue with some factual information I have written via generalities, confused fuzzy logic, and at least one fallacy that demonstrates you don't understand the basic laws of physics as applied to fighter performance (The "P-51 turns better at high speed!" thing). Then when everything you have to say is refuted by logic, you take your toys and go home, or do the "chess playing pigeon" thing. I have observed that this is generally your MO in any discussion.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/fc35goo75nlfmu4/P51DvYak3.ahfThis fight is a good example of the mediocrity of the P-51D. I don't know if a single other LW fighter would have had trouble with the Yak3 going vertical like that from a roughly co-speed state, as the P-51 did here. Certainly not the SpitXVI or La7, despite the fact that the P-51 bizarrely also shares their ENY of 5. Nor a 109K or a P-38 for that matter, for all their higher ENY numbers. All would almost certainly have been able to match zoom performances with the Yak long enough to kill.
After the Yak successfully ropes the P-51 and puts it in a very bad spot, only mistakes in speed management on the Yak pilot's part make it squirt out in front of the P-51 and allow for the P-51 to have any firing opportunities at all. These are opportunities that a more heavily armed, faster rolling P-47M could have taken far better advantage of. Really any of the Late War planes named thus to far would have been more advantageous in this fight than the P-51D, with the *possible* exception of the 190D9. The whole fight was basically a serious of mistakes by BOTH pilots, with a lot of missed shots on both sides being the most important factor in why this thing lasted as long as it did.
In fact, this engagement is another demonstration of how gunnery is the most important skill of air combat. Either pilot could have easily ended the fight with the shots they missed.
I believe the Yak3 pilot had to basically be having an off day to lose this one to a P-51, although I will say the Yak probably would have gotten shot down at 00:35 or so if it had tried going vertical like that against any plane less mediocre than the Mustang, which is to say virtually Late War plane. Then again, the pilot probably wouldn't have tried that move against any Late War fighter except the Mustang.
If I was a particularly fuzzy thinker, I might say something like "Look, I made my P-51 out-turn a Yak-3", and crow about da mad skillz, or insist that the P-51D is as good at dogfighting as a Yak-3, or some other horsepuckey. But of course that is absolutely NOT the case, relative turn performance did not define the geometry of this fight at all, and the only reason the Yak-3 didn't win rather easily is almost certainly because the pilot was having a "bad hair day" as it were.
