In theory at least !

[HagarTheHorrible]

I forget who, but some Luftwaffe commander, late in the war, claimed it was pointless producing ever more powerful machines when the fit and finish of the airframes was negating any gains.

 

Do you, and if so how, model shoddy workmanship ( quite possibly intentional) into the flight models ?

 

Do you just go by the theoretical numbers, possibly reinforced by the numbers produced by the testing of the relatively pampered prototype or do you start with the theoretical best and then have a small variable per aircraft used to allow for varying production quality ?

[PatrickAWlson]

Not sure, but given that the numbers are from test trials they are probably factory fresh.  While the issue that you point out is very real it is also really difficult to quantify, especially given that every instance of a type is going to have the same FM.  As far as I am aware they do not randomize things like drag and CoG to simulate variations in build.

[ZachariasX]

There is a slider in CloD that lets you set the wear on an aircraft. IIRC this just affected the textures, but implemented in such a way, it could be used to affect FM as well. Absent this choice, I doubt that anything but a factory fresh aircraft performing to specification would be acceptable.

[migmadmarine]

Didn't Rise of Flight have some small variation window on engine performance whenever you spawned an aircraft? 

[Royal_Flight]

Is anything added by including such a feature?

Randomised features that affect gameplay like this are arguably more likely to be a frustration than a benefit, and if the effect is subtle enough that it's hard to notice then there's arguably no point in the first place.

 

Just a thought, keen to hear your views.

Edited January 18, 2018 by Royal_Flight

[BraveSirRobin]

Didn't Rise of Flight have some small variation window on engine performance whenever you spawned an aircraft?

 

Yes. I believe that BoX does the same.

[Oubaas]

I'm currently reading, "The First Air War 1914-1918" by Lee Kennett. He notes that...

 

"There were airplanes that seemed inherently better or worse than others of the very same breed, and no one knew quite why. Two Sopwith Camels, apparently identical, would not have identical flight characteristics; one could go higher than the other; and, if they both flew with throttles wide open, one would edge ahead of the other. In 1917 the British Air Board received many complaints from pilots at the front that they had received "bad" Camels that could not reach altitude. Many airmen felt the best guarantee of a "good" plane was to have one with airframe and motor built by the parent firms, those that had designed them; thus the most desirable Camel was one built by the Sopwith firm, and with a Clerget motor manufactured in the Clerget shops."

 

It's a great read, highly recommended.

 

During my own career, there always seemed to be one or two aircraft in a given squadron that were known as perennial turkeys.

 

But, should stuff like that be modeled in a flight sim? It might be pretty frustrating. Realistic, yes. But if we're doing this in a virtual world, why not have things as we wish they were in real life, i.e., top readiness, flawless reliability?

[blitze]

Not sure if this also helps but with regards to production defects or materials used, take a Lagg3 for a spin and put it in a dive at 600kp/h and see how well she holds together.  We also have the Me109 Glass Tail syndrome which can be very delicate to 20mm fire.  Stress points are also modeled so damaged flight surfaces can break under g load stress.

 

Not sure if there is a wear and tear factor built in as well.  Be it hammer field repairs on the VVS side or German overkill on tolerances that leads to machines not coping with the wide temperature ranges and environmental conditions they were having to operate under on the Eastern Front.

[56RAF_Roblex]

No way.  There is nothing 'immersive' or 'fun' about a random number generator deciding to make your aircraft not work properly so it cannot keep up with the rest of your squadron or the wing falls off doing a maneuver that has never been a problem before.   Imagine if all new cars were made with a spike that fires out and gives a flat tyre at random intervals because "People get flat tyres sometimes". You would be really annoyed that a computer destroyed your perfectly healthy tyre just on a whim :-)

 

Now if there was a way to degrade the performance of your engine based on how badly you treated your engine over the last 10 hours of flying then I might consider it.

[Guest deleted@134347]

I think you need to look at the big picture here.

 

Today we already have a lottery built in to our experience with IL-2. And that lottery comes to us in a silicon form. I.e. silicon lottery in connection with our CPU's and GPU's affects our ability to over-clock the performance of our pc's, that in the end affects the performance of the game that in the end affects the performance of our aircraft.

 

so.. there..

 

adding an artificial in-game lottery will only test our patience and nothing else.

[BlitzPig_EL]

In the very early days of the original IL2, spark plug fouling was modeled.  If you didn't let the engine warm up properly it would miss and have less power.  I don't recall if this was random or not, it's been a while after all.

The "feature" was soon patched out because online if this happened you simply hit the refly button and got a fresh aircraft that didn't miss.  which of course is really more historical, because no one would take off with a missing, poorly running engine.  Either you would go to another aircraft on the field that did work, or you just didn't fly that day.

 

It didn't work well then and it won't work well today.

[HagarTheHorrible]

Ok, I'll put it another way.

 

777, I imagine, have pretty much nailed down the development of FM's for aircraft such as the 109. The aircraft didn't change radically over it's life so what is true of an "F" is probabably also pretty much true of a "G". German engineers developed some remarkable aircraft and versions of aircraft but what they couldn't overcome were the limitations imposed by a fracturing production line, unskilled, unenthusiastic labour and diminishing access to quality materials, to put it simply, towards the end of the war it all became a bit slap dash.

 

The question is do the developers produce late war German aircraft that are simply an evolved sum of their parts or do they, suck their teeth, scratch their balls for a bit and give consideration to the situation pertaining to the production of late war German aircraft and take that into account when making up new FM's ?

[Ribbon]

Maybe it was tought about propeler design, gaining max speed after it becomes inaffective.

[Ribbon]

I'm currently reading, "The First Air War 1914-1918" by Lee Kennett. He notes that...

 

"There were airplanes that seemed inherently better or worse than others of the very same breed, and no one knew quite why. Two Sopwith Camels, apparently identical, would not have identical flight characteristics; one could go higher than the other; and, if they both flew with throttles wide open, one would edge ahead of the other. In 1917 the British Air Board received many complaints from pilots at the front that they had received "bad" Camels that could not reach altitude. Many airmen felt the best guarantee of a "good" plane was to have one with airframe and motor built by the parent firms, those that had designed them; thus the most desirable Camel was one built by the Sopwith firm, and with a Clerget motor manufactured in the Clerget shops."

 

It's a great read, highly recommended.

 

During my own career, there always seemed to be one or two aircraft in a given squadron that were known as perennial turkeys.

 

But, should stuff like that be modeled in a flight sim? It might be pretty frustrating. Realistic, yes. But if we're doing this in a virtual world, why not have things as we wish they were in real life, i.e., top readiness, flawless reliability?

Even now in modern times every engine that is the same model gives different values in performance, there is no indentical produced engine so they use for example resistors which are unique for each engine that limits/shows output values as a standard.

Or better to say every engine has it's own unique resistor and usb(with his performance data adjusted to model standards) which are used to gain same performance in same conditions as other engines in that series.

Very important for multiengine aircrafts!

At least it is the case in turbo prop and turbo fan engines.

I don't know how it goes in piston engines, but that might be the case in ook you read.

[RedeyeStorm]

Hmm. I would like to remind every one that the Mig-3 suffered badly from poor production quality. The result was that a lot of planes where lost bbecause the wings came loose under stress. And what is the point if you do not take into consideration the changing quality of the pilot training or the force equation?

 

It is impossible to completly simulate WWII so don't bother with these details is my opinion.

Edited January 19, 2018 by FFS_RedeyeStorm

[216th_Jordan]

Yeah I'd rather not go with these limitations either. We have it cosmetically with incredibly bad perspex on the LaGG-3 already, god I hate it :/

[OrLoK]

Id like to see previously damaged aircraft and production flaws in the campaign or as a toggleable choice in mp.