TXWard wrote:
Unless you know what the pilot instructions were for the Fokker D.VII, shouldn't apples be compared to apples? The "effective flying time" for the S.E.5a was 1-1/2 hrs., that of the Fokker D.VII was 1 hr. This gives the S.E.5a a 150% advantage over the D.VII, which is even better than the 140% in the game.
I beg to dissent. Effective flight time is not effective combat time. They have nothing to do with each other. Effective flight time (flight endurance) is more related with combat range, as in: go where the enemy is, fight, come back. The longer the endurance, the further you can fly.
Combat endurance is basically how long you can fight. Nowadays, with jet fighters with fuel guzzling afterburners, altitude is much less important as an energy storage, since you can basically go through a fuel tank in less than 10 minutes of dogfight. This is because modern a/c (and, to some extent, WWII a/c) fly at different fuel economy between cruise and combat, with at least an order of magnitude in fuel consumption difference. Fuel IS a major factor for disengagement in contemporary times.
In WWI, on the other hands, engines more or less ran at full power all the time and, barring airscrew design issues, more or less consumed the same amount of fuel in combat and 'cruise'.
The whole point revolves around a single argument: the engine power at those time was insufficient to feed combat manoeuvring (fast rolling and high g turning). The only other sources of energy were speed and altitude. As usual, barring odd situations, speed is life. Go slow and you are a sitting duck. Go fast and you may live. This basically means two things:
1) in order to manoeuvre you have to loose altitude.
2) since, with increasing speed, engine _thrust_ decreases, climb whenever you can to regain energy.
If a fight is tight, both opponents drop from the sky to treetop level in few minutes, as Phil Hall correctly wrote, citing the majority of WWI AARs.
As a last point, if you check BM design notes (http://pease1.sr.unh.edu/1/bluemax/designnotes.html you will notice that an air combat is supposed to last two minutes, which is at least one order of magnitude less than the effective flight time everybody has given in this discussion. It means, to me, that the whole fuel system (different a/cs) having different fuel capacities) is inconsistent.
In my opinion, the only consistent way to keep in check game length is to set a hard limit on game turns, since it looks quite unfeasible to introduce a good system to handle altitude and energy.
I could go further boring everybody about how manoeuvring is more important than speed to energy management, or do some math to demonstrate what I just stated, but I will stop this already too long post here.
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