So which of your statements (NOTHING or MAJOR) is correct and which one is wrong? Because the both can not be correct. I will not even begin to get into the problems in your above quoted reasoning. Because your simple statement of T/W ratio is completely meaningless with regards to prop driven planes because thrust varies with speed and hence with out other parameters T/W is meaningless .
HiTech
Here's my original statement:
Most planes will perform a zoom (ballistic) climb the same. There's virtually no difference. Any differences that are present have nothing to do with climb performance.
Climb performance, as I'm sure you're aware, is the sustained rate of climb (or RoC) that can be achieved for a given flight configuration. RoC, then, which is how we determine climb performance, and it is defined as the following:
"In aeronautics, the rate of climb (RoC) is an aircraft's vertical speed – the rate of change in altitude. In most ICAO member countries (even in otherwise metric countries), this is usually expressed in feet per minute (ft/min)."Forgive me for quoting wikipedia, as my training materials are at home at the moment. However, the definition is correct.
Climb performance, then, can be summarized, or represented by RoC. My statement, logically, becomes:
Performance in a zoom climb has nothing to do with rate of climb.This statement is correct.
You then brought up throttle settings, and I understand why - climb performance is chiefly dependent upon throttle setting, and adjusting the throttle setting would also affect zoom climb performance; however,
climb performance is not synonymous with throttle setting. Otherwise, any plane at 100% throttle could be assumed to have the same climb performance as any other plane at 100% throttle. No, actual climb performance is based on multiple factors, such as throttle, flap settings, etc. I simply acknowledged where you were coming from, even though it's technically not the same subject nor are we discussing it.
The only reason I adjusted my wording is to account for outliers, as I mentioned in my second reply, such as the Me 163. Now, zoom climb might be dependent upon climb performance
configuration settings, but yet again, this is not the same thing as the definition for "climb performance."
Again, the statement remains correct.
This was never about aerodynamic debates, it was about functional air combat rules. My initial reply still remains the same and unchanged: an aircraft's zoom climb performance has nothing to do with its sustained climb performance. The two are unrelated. This was understood apparently by the majority of the other posters here, and Poison and Canspec both readily understood the context of the statement. This is entirely what I meant from the beginning.
