Hello All,
This is a subject I have been thinking of for about the last month or so.
It started with a discussion on another site about the FW 190A and how poorly it is simulated in "Flight Simulators".
In the particular Game in question, the player stated that the 190A was such a poor aircraft that it needed to have an escort of Me 109s to get to a bomber intercept.
While I agree that a Sturmbock 190A with extra guns and a LOT more armour would not be competitive in a fighter duel, the regular 190A historically was quite a dangerous adversary in fighter combat.
Even in Combat Flight SIMULATOR, the stock FW 190A requires a superior pilot or very good teamwork to be competitive in a fighter.
One has to wonder HOW the 190A became such a brick in the simulators.
This sounds like a rehash of several earlier posts I have made over the years, but it is just a lead in to the real discussion.
The fellow who started this discussion actually was a player of "World of Warplanes". In order to address his issues, I had to do some basic research (not in the game) of WoWP and came across Wings of Thunder which is a very similar game.
The basic idea of these games is online competition with other players.
A new player starts with a ridiculous pre-war BIPLANE fighter (such as a Heinkel 51 which is more suited to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936) and earns points / money to buy and equip later fighters in the "Tech Tree".
The choices get to be rather fanciful especially at the higher Tech Levels with aircraft that belonged more in Luftwaffe 1946 and Luftwaffe Pilots' fantasies.
Many of these "Tech Trees", especially in WoWP simply do not make sense and have almost no connection with history.
...Or does it make more sense to condemn a Japanese Carrier pilot to flying nothing more advanced than the A6M5 ReiSen as was the case historically (off of non-existent Japanese Carriers).
On some of these message boards, I also came across discussions that sounded quite well reasoned if most of the research was done in an Elementary School Library. To back up some claims, there was plenty of "information" presented that was simply wrong or had no bearing on the discussion. As is the case with computers, when Garbage goes in, the output is usually Garbage as well. One has to wonder at the conclusions from these discussions and how very similar "scientific" analyses may have made the FW 190 such a cripple. One has to wonder how many other aircraft (especially Japanese) have been "Nerfed" (the other fellow's term) in a similar manner without people realizing it because the information matches the most common (and typically incorrect) books?
This brings me finally to the point of this posts:
I and I believe most of the folks who design for CFS build an aircraft project pretty much in a vacuum. We try to get the flight performance and weaponry "correct" so that the relative strengths and weaknesses are as WE PERCEIVE they were historically. We leave the scenarios for using the aircraft to mission builders.
I for one don't concern myself with the actual historical context of how the aircraft was actually used or what other factors made it a success of failure. (Superiority of one side's pilots, better maintenance, greater numbers, tactical situation, etc.)
....So....
Does it bother anyone that depending on the country you choose to fly for (I build and fly for all of them), that you may have NO good aircraft to choose from? (Italians were pretty hopeless for late war fighters.) Does it bother anyone that every single German pilot that you meet online will be flying either a FW 190D or a Me 109K or even a Me 262? How about a virtual RAF that flies nothing but Griffon Spitfires and Tempests? How about a US Navy that flies only F4U-4 Corsairs or <cough> F8F Bearcats?
What do you do when Game Balance becomes more important that realistic simulation? How many of us can recognize when this is happening and what do we do about it?
Thoughts?
- Ivan.
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