Flying The 'Ace Maker' [Fokker D.VII]

[SeaW0lf]

Interesting read about the D.VII of Mikael Carlson. Click on the image to go to the article.

 

[HagarTheHorrible]

Thanks for sharing, enjoyed that.  Two things that caught my attention.  The first comes under the heading “No free lunches”,  high compression engines heat up fast and need to be constantly watched and regulated when on warm days and at low level,  I assume the altitude throttle would only exaggerate that.  Maybe heat coefficients should be reconsidered in light of this article to limit any abuse of WEP at lower altitudes.  I do appreciate he would have been flying conservatively, for the engines sake, but it does emphasise the need to consider the engine for longer than is usually necessary for sim pilots even if there is an exaggerated penalty point for abuse.

The second point that he made was about the poor roll performance of the aircraft, not disastrous but never the less not good. I think it is indicative of the design choices and experience at that stage of the war, Ambush ambush ambush, which is essentially what the Germans had be doing all along, apart from the Triplane foray, that was a rather short lived experiment.

Edited July 25, 2019 by HagarTheHorrible

[SeaW0lf]

I saw that too, but the thing is that no aircraft in ROF has WEP model for wear and tear, and it would be a massive work to model them all (you can't model just one aircraft because we found and article about it). On the other hand, I think we have wrong models regarding over-rev in most of them, the so called glass engines. For example, one of the 'perks' (if there is any) of the nerfed Camel in ROF is that you cannot blow the engine in dives (it was so nerfed that you can't over-rev the Camel). This is an advantage in dogfights, and we've seen many accounts of them 'diving almost vertically at full throttle' in WWI. I think Gould Lee has some of these.

 

I'm no expert on the D.VII, but I wonder which version is the engine. The one we got with altitude throttle is not the D.IIIaü, but the BMW IIIa. On Mikael's website it says Daimler D.IIIaü, 200hp, which might be a variant from the Mercedes one that we've got (180hp). Perhaps the engine everyone asks for the D.VII Vanilla? I'm not sure.

 

So there are many layers to it. And I remembered that the Sopwith Pup seems to have some WEP control. You can’t turnfight with it for long at full throttle without blowing the engine, but the Pup is so deadly (a Dr.I killer if you do it right) that I don’t mind. In the times the Pup was unerfed, some servers banned her from the lineup such was her performance.

[bubo942]

He is also making 1:1 replica of PFALZ D.VIII with original Siemens-Halske Sh.III geared rotary  

[SeaW0lf]

From what I read, he's the one doing one of the best replicas out there. And I was surprised that the article mentioned the cruise and max speeds on the D.VII. They seldom do.

[1PL-Husar-1Esk]

That was very informative review about flying the plane. I really like it much even better than one found in "Flying the old planes" book by Frank Tallman

Edited July 25, 2019 by 307_Tomcat

[J5_Gamecock]

Thanks for posting this. Enjoyable reading.