Whatiffery

[Commander Stormwolf]

in real life, Mvr helps you in the "evade" part of air combat

when a Zero was on an F4F's tail, the pilot would radio his wingman "clear my tail!"

when an F4F was on a Zero's tail, the pilot would pull his stick up, and clear his own tail


low wing loading fighters went out of favour because... a Nate can evade the attacks of a hellcat (see David McCambell dogfight)
but has no way to shoot down a heavily armored plane

and Speed + Firepower + Armor combined to give a bigger advantage over horizontal maneouverability...

[Erkki]

ORIGINAL: dwg


If you notice I did discuss Lift Induced Drag. Lift is proportional to AoA, but also to speed (and airfoil factors), if you increase the aircraft weight, then for a given amount of lift you either need to increase the AoA, increase the speed, or increase the lift of the airfoil, for instance by deploying flaps or slats (or even altering the wing design). It's not a simple issue. Unless you're flying at the ceiling of the aircraft, you don't need to max out lift, so what you're going to see is a decrease in the efficiency at which you're flying, and more sluggish acceleration, but not necessarily gross changes in maximum speed - there will be some, but in comparison to the other factors the engine doesn't consider, most particularly variation in performance with altitude, I don't think they're significant.

Besides Lysander is so damn slow for a WW2 combat aircraft already that losing a couple of miles from the top speed cant make it much worse. [:D]