USN air combat data from Office of Naval Intelligence

[IronDuke_slith]

Nevermind I quess we can't use Aug 7th as example for IJN versus USN aircombat.

[mogami]

Hi, I really don't care what aircraft UV/WITP models as the 'BEST' I only want the games to get it right. I'm having problems finding data that supports the Wildcat P-40 being all a round better AC compared to Zero and Oscar.
The P-40 air victories I find are mostly IJA bombers being shot down (often without any escort) And the numbers reported can not be correct (they are often multiples more then actual number Japanese had)
F4F numbers prior to Aug 42 are based on Coral Sea, Midway and a few again unescorted bomber encounters. There is nothing that compares to what occured during Solomon Campaign that can be used to state the F4F was superiour.

The AVG's first use of P-40 was 14 P-40's shooting up 9 unescorted Sonia's
The next action resulted in P-40's and Buffalo-I's intercepting Sally and Lilly with some (1 out of 4 encounters that day) Nate escorts. No Buffalo-I's were lost but 3xP-40's were lost. From what I can decipher 7 Japanese bombers and 1 Nate were shot down. (with many bombers returning to Bangkok or other bases damaged)

I don't know what to make of the claim for 296 Japanese planes confirmed with 300 more probable. for only 20 AC lost. It seems the AVG never fought a single Zero. A large number of the kills appear to be unescorted Sonia. Mary, Sally, Lilly
with a few Nates thrown in. (but almost certainly not 596 total)
Using this data would certainly produce a wrong model.

I don't think the allied fan boys realize how quickly the Japanese can go from being a match to being overmatched without any change in allied AC. (The Buffalo-I's win battles in Dec 41. They would win more battles in Dec 1943 when the pilots flying them were still trained while the Japanese pilots were not)
It's not so much the issue of aircraft as it is pilots. And the game already has far more Allied trained pilots then Japanese trained pilots. All the Allies have to do (and what they actually did) Is get the Japanese involved in a long air battle.

The big mistake made in UV is attempting to move into Japanese airspace prior to winning the airbattle.

[TIMJOT]

Mogami,

Can you tell me if individual pilot expirence is factored into operational loss rates or is operational losses modeled seperately?

Thanks

[HMSWarspite]

One issue that keeps being discussed here is kill ratio (i.e. number shot down of the enemy vs number lost in doing so). There are several reasons why loss ratio is not a good relative assessment of two aircraft (although it is a good assessment of the relative effectiveness of the two). The difference is subtle, but stay with me, I will return to it.

Modern (ish) operational research studies, and air combat modelling (on an commercial military, or academic basis, not games) tends to show that, in any engagement where all is equal, the losses approximate to the square of the odds. In other words, if 8 aircraft engage 4 aircraft the losses will TEND towards 4:1. This does not say how many aircraft will be shot down, only the ratio. Thus a high kill ratio MAY be due to numbers.

If fighters are tied to non-optimised roles (e.g. close escort of bombers), the tactical situation will dictate the losses.

If one side has to fight at extreme range, they have fewer tactical options than the opposition: refusing to engage until the situation is right is not one of them, thus assuming they have a role (air superiority, escort etc) they may be forced to engage at a disadvantage, etc

I could go on (I haven't covered pilot skill for example), but I hope you can see from above that the kill ratio is definately the combination of several factors. It is thus a poor parameter to use ON ITS OWN, to judge the 'better' aircraft.

The kill ratio does give a measure of how effective an aircraft is: in the hypothetical case where 100 a/c of type A fight an enemy of type B, and have a kill ratio of 2:1, they will (on average) shoot down 200 enemy before they are eliminated. Please do not however take this literally - pilot moral, and numbers engaged will tend to kick in at some point!

So, what can we use to judge the relative merit of 2 aircraft? And the answer depends on what you are trying to achieve. I assume no one will challenge that the Zero was the better aircraft at turning, climbing, and exerting an influence at range from base. The F4F was better at absorbing damage, diving, surviving operational mishaps, etc.

What did this mean in practice? Well, from what I have read it appears to have meant a 1:1 kill ratio (roughly) for each side (if I have read the posts above correctly, I have no new figures of my own). But how many Zeros, did it take to shoot down 1 F4F for every one that was lost? (And vice versa). If 100 Zeros achieved 1:1 kills against 400 F4F (for example), now which is the better? If 100 F4F achieved 1:1 at its extreme range most of the time, whilst the Zero was comfortably within normal range, how does that effect things?

I put it to you that the reason why this argument has not achieved any sort of resolution is that the full story has not been examined. It may also be because there is no solution that will please everyone!

My personal view (and I am open to REASONED counter arguments) is that the Zero, when used in the way it usually was, was superior to the F4F when used in the way it usually was. The effectiveness of the Zero was due to its agility, range, and the skill of the pilots. The effectiveness of the F4F rose considerably when sufficient combat experience had been accrued to evolve the tactics that played to the F4F strengths, and enabled the Zero's weaknesses to be found (fragile, poor max dive speed, and individualistic pilot training rather than teams - although this latter is nothing to do with the a/c). The Thach weave was not evolved because Thach was bored! It was needed to allow the F4F to stay in combat and shoot down the other guy. Something that early F4F pilots do seem to struggle to do. I would thus rate the Zero as 'better', and the F4F as capable of equality when used in the correct way.

[Spoof Hollywood Klaxon] WHOOOP WHOOP now hear this...stations for repelling air attack...this is not a drill, repeat this is not a drill.

[Nomad]

Mogami, I would completly agree with you. I am not a 'historian' but I have read a number of books on the subject. The one thing that I found throughout is that once the Allies got through the 'crust' of the Japanese airforces, they were on their way to winning the war. The starting pilots, expecially for the IJN, are very good and the 'Zero' is a good attack aircraft, but once the pilots were used up, their replacements were not up to the task since losses were mounting in the Solomons faster than replacements could be trained. All the important CV battles had been fought before the F6F was available and the F4F won them, but not without losses. But the USN had the pilot training program to keep feeding in well trained pilots and the IJN could not match them.

[mogami]

Hi, It seems to me that air combat has many factors that have to be in place before outcomes can be resolved. Aircraft types, morales, fatigue, pilot skill, mission types. Among a few. How to set up encounters where everything is equal (except aircraft types.) Appears to me very difficult to glean from history.

What would be the outcome from encounters where both sides flew the same aircraft and pilots had the same skills? (1-1 or 0-0)
If we use the above and then give one side the tactical advantage (or just give one group a better leader)

[mdiehl]

Ah. So much confusion, so little time.

No, you have just proven my point beyond belief. Anyone who happens to take any view other then your (and Trist's repeating of your) *facts* must be an Axis fanboy. Personally, you just did more damage to yourself with that statement then anything I could have put forward to discredit your views.

Only damaged my credibility in your POV. You know, the POV in which you utterly distort, to the point of wholesale fabrication, everything that has been said about the relative merits of the a/c. And you are at least honest about your emotional reason for fabricating oyur straw man: you don't like seeing complimentary things said about allied aircraft.

You have stated in your reply that your sample used specific air to air encounters of a dogfight only variety and you eliminated other aspects of air combat as it happened during UV timeframe (in other words you eliminated the majority of the fighting that happened in the Pacific). You expect people to go forward and use your absolutely biased data (and I quote)

My data are unbiased. I have run the calculatiosn several ways, which you would know if you'd go back a few threads. Several years ago I used gross tallies of a/c shot down, all types, at Guadalacanal. In that calculation the US won by a confirmed (based on participants records of their own losses, not based on pilot claims) 2.5:1 kill ratio. I then assumed that fighters lost attacking warships, in ground attack, or shooting at bombers, while interesting, would tell us nothing about the relative merits of the F4F and A6M. So I limited the data to include fights between fighter aircraft whose immediate mission was to destroy enemy fighter aircraft. That seemed to me to be the best way to reduce the data to pure instances where fighter pilot skill and airplane characteristics would be strongest.

When I include all mission types, as you suggest, the loss ratios favor the US in every category of aircraft throughout the Guadalacanal campaign except fighters. There the loss ratio is 1.4:1 favoring the Japanese. That, of course, however, includes things like P39s lost in ground attack.

What possible purpose is this other than to shift the realities into your own little world when now USA aircraft perform better then they actually did

The purpose is as stated above. To reduce the noise-to-signal ratio in a well-reasoned and logical effort to get to the heart of the question. I reiterate, when you include ALL MISSIONS, as you would, then the ratios pretty much favor the US.

When you take fighter vs fighter missions at Guadalcanal only the ratio is about 1.2:1 favoring the Japanese. If you throw away the two outliers (one that favors the Japanese in early-mid August, I forget the exact date, I did these stats over two years ago, and one that favored the US in late Spetember or early October), the ratio is almost exactly 1:1.

If you use only USN VF pilots from carriers fighting Japanese pilots from carriers the loss ratio is roughly 1.5:1 favoring the US, despite the fact that many of these CV vs CV engagements occurred at ranges where the F4Fs were near the limits of their endurance.

I fail to understand your logic or purpose other then to debate selective facts that really have no bearing on the realities of either UV or WitP.

I'm happy to enlighten you about the salience of selecting data relevant to the question asked.

The point that you and your followers gloss over is the realities of the early Pacific war, trying instead to produce some altered version of the game where real hardships faced by the Allies simply vanish with your *special* data sample.

The realities of the game include the need for the Japanese player to engineer, via deployment of superior numbers, and by forcing the enemy to fight in circumstances that favor the Japanese, results that work for Japan. It is inappropriate for the model to simply assume that the Japanese, being Japanese, can count on winning a campaign solely because of the types of aircraft deployed or the presumed superiority of their pilots. That dog won't hunt.

[mogami]

Hi, mdiehl can you breakdown the Solomon Campaign further? Prehaps into periods where new Airgroups arrive. First encounters that sort of thing to see if such a thing as the Japanese passing the breaking point?

I've been intriged by Danial Oskars posting of hours required for pilots to be assigned front line duty. As the war goes on there are far fewer Japanese pilots aquiring high amounts of combat hours. At some point it had to become the primary factor in the outcome of aircombat. (I still think 1100 hour Buffalo pilots would kick butt against 30 hour Zero pilots)

[mdiehl]

I'm having problems finding data that supports the Wildcat P-40 being all a round better AC compared to Zero and Oscar.

It depends on the data that you count. If you look at aircraft performance specs, the P40 was probably a better aircraft all around than the Zeke, unless you place a very heavy weight on range. The Zeke had them all beat for combat radius. In airspeed, the P40 was faster, rolled faster, had a higher service altitude, and like most aircraft, could out turn a Zero when both a/c were travelling at speeds in excess of about 320 mph.

The Wildcat was a completely different plane. It was about 10 mph slower than the Zeke max level flight airspeed. One could argue that, to a degree, this speed advantage pretty much forced the F4F to try to "dogfight" breifly with the Zeke. However, at speeds around 320 mph the wildcat could keep pace with a Zeke in a turn, At higher speeds, as when the F4F dived, it could actually out-turn the Zeke. This is the primary reason why the preferred escape and evade tactic for an F4F in dire straits was to engage in a steep, turning dive (assuming it had the alttitude to use this tactic). The Zeke could keep pace in a dive up to about 350-380 mph (records aren't completely clear on this... there may be some variation in different production runs) but could not turn with the diving Wildcat. The characteristics that made the Zeke an outstanding low-speed turner, the large control surfaces proportional to the large wing surfaces, made it hard to turn at high speed. Airflow tended to push the control surfaces to the neutral position despite all efforts of the Japanese pilot to endeavor otherwise. From a high altitude (15Kplus feet) the F4F could exceed 400 mph. At speeds approaching 400 mph, the Zekes broke up.

In some respects the Zeke was a better plane. At low speed (< about 280 mph) it could out-turn, out-climb, and out-accelerate an F4F. This superiority was mitigated somewhat by the durability of the F4F. In a truning engagement with lots of deflection shots, the F4F could take what the Zeke could dish out. The Zeke, on the other hand, could not sustain even brief concentrated impacts from an F4F. So the superior deflection shooting of American pilots, and their superior emphasis on teamwork (all PRIOR TO THE WIDESPREAD USE OF THE THACH_FLATLEY BEAM DEFENSE, JUST IN CASE ANYONE STARTS YAMMERING ABOUT THAT), allowed the F4F to hold its own.

So in 1942 I'd say that the F4F was slightly inferior but that F4F pilots were slightly superior, when compared to the Zeke and Zeke pilots. I'd say that USN CV pilots were considerably better than IJN pilots. Thach's analysis on that score was right on the mark. I have said many terms in these discussion that the most salient one-word adjective to describe the relationship between F4F plane+pilot combination vs the A6M plane+pilot combination is "PARITY."

I'd say that the P40 was an all around better plane than the Zeke, based on performance characteristics. Hard data on combat losses of Zekes and P40s in mutual combat is, however, difficult to come by.

Mogami-

I could break them down but will not. I'd have to get Lundstrom from the library again and reread the whole narrative, taking notes along the way. No time for that right now but it would probably be an interesting exercise. Why don't you give it a go?

[mogami]

Hi, Also I'm finding that the Oscar could out turn a Zero (it had butterfly flaps-whatever those are)

The 1942 Zero pilot groups had by the time of Coral Sea been in combat for 5 months. I'm certain they contained pilots added during that time that did not compare to the lost pilots. One of the things I'm trying to discover in testing is the impact of 5 months of combat.
The USN groups likely dd not suffer loss compared to IJN and replacments were likely closer in skill to those they replaced. (And they had alot of training time once they joined groups)

I guess I'm asking if this can help explain the myth in that the Japanese Air groups encountered from May 1942 onwards were measureably lower in overall skill then these same groups had been in Dec 41. How many pilots/leaders does it take losing before overall group suffers a decline? (This would still allow exceptional Japanese pilots/groups to exist)

[mdiehl]

Yeah, it could. The Oscar was lighter yet than the Zeke (no need for CV landings... the Zeke's landing gear was relatively robust among early-war Japanese fighters), and two-stage flaps on the Oscar. I do not recall offhand whether or not the A6M had flaps of any kind. The wing loading was so small that I doubt it needed them, even for CV landings.

[mogami]

Hi, UV/WITP use manuverabilty for aircraft data. If I was to rerate aircraft what should I use? (It will still be called Mvr but will include data other then just turn rates. I'll add as many factors as needed and then divide the total number of inputs for final rating.)

Example: Dive 35 Turn 36 Climb 32 Roll 37 =Mvr rating of 35

How do we define a numerical rating?

Make a commitee to assign values for each aircraft.

[Drex]

Hi all,



There is one in making by Norm Koger (author of TOAW):

The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905

http://home.austin.rr.com/normkoger/RJW.html


Leo "Apollo11"


P.S. before UV (and WitP in future) the TOAW was my best game (I own TOAW-CoW).

NWS simulations has a tactical naval wargame of WWI and WWII out with demos. Graphics are good but the game design is basically a battleline vs battleline with limited manuever. Armor and damage seem sophisticated.

[Pascal_slith]

Hello,

a lot of interesting questions and comments have been brought up in this thread.

Mdiehl: is there a PDF on the internet somewhere of Thach's report?

Does anyone have an answer for Apollo 11? Even accounting for a number of reserve aircraft and aircraft used for training purposes plus losses other than in the combat zones, the discrepancy does look quite large.

For a detailed account (with verified numbers) of air combat during the first year of the Pacific War I highly recommend Lundstrom's two books 'The First Team' and 'The First Team and Guadalcanal'. He has done an admirable job of verifying numbers. Also, about disparate numbers reported in different sources you should consult H.P. Willmott's 'The Barrier and the Javelin'.

Regards,

Pascal

[Tristanjohn]

The following link to the diary of Ensign F.R. "Cash" Register, Wildcat pilot with VF-5, makes interesting reading.

http://www.daveswarbirds.com/cactus/diary.htm

Ensign Register was one of about 14 airmen who personally received Distinguished Flying Crosses from Admiral Nimitz during Nimitz' visit to Guadalcanal on September 30. He is credited with eight kills during his time in the Solomons, but was shot down during the Aleutian campaign in the battle for Attu Island.

Of interest is his entry for August9, 1942, in which he states, "We can't compete with the Japs in the F4F.".

Also, I recall a saying amongst Cactus flyers,
"If you come across a zero and you are alone...run like hell, because you are outnumbered".

The perceived inferiority among Wildcat pilots of the Wildcat when confronted by the Zero seems at odds with the combat stats but may be explained by the relative designs.

Whereas the Zero had great maneuverability at low speeds it was achieved at the expense of protection. The reverse being true for the Wildcat.

Over Guadalcanal the Japs were a long way from their base and any damage to their aircraft could prove fatal, while the Wildcat pilots could attempt a ditch close to base or a deadstick landing.

The Wildcats stood a good chance of being shot up and surviving, while the Zero stood little chance if shot up.
The Zero pilot may have felt superior in the dogfight 90% of the time but died in a freball the other 10% of the time.

That's interesting but old hat and at least partly accounted for by preconceptions widely held coming into the war.

One has to keep in mind that Japanese pilots had been educated to believe they were not only inherently superior on cultural but also racial grounds to their enemies and were furthermore supposed to be divinely guided "on high" by favorable Imperial and karmic forces.

Now there is no doubt the "Zero" was an admirable performer in some handling respects vis-a-vis its Allied-fighter counterparts early in the war and enjoyed success in consequence, so it ought to come as little surprise that as late (actually early with respect to America's intervention) as August 1942 an American Wildcat pilot might state matter-of-factly (and somewhat melodramatically) that he felt overwhelmed "up there" by the "Zero" opposition, most especially when he was "alone."

What this aviator (and collectively as you present it "tales from Cactus") did not mention is that Wildcats did not make a practice of flying "alone" against "Zeroes" but rather in teams, and team tactics were soon enough devised and found to be effective in getting the most possible out of these all-round good Grumman airplanes--kill statistics and various accounts from both Allied and Japanese pilots, not to mention professional observers on the sidelines, demonstrate this to be so.

As you wrote yourself, this pilot's opinion flies in the face of kill statistics from encounters between these respective airplanes even up to that relatively early date in the war (August 1942), and of course subsequent results in battle during the Solomons Campaign continued to swing ever more in favor of Allied planes and crews as combat dragged on.

Reasonable conclusions one might draw from this pilot's statement are 1) his opinion turned out to be mistaken within the larger scheme of things, 2) he felt personally overawed as late as August 1942 by the "Zero" and 3) he was only qualified to speak for himself within whatever limited context of combat experience he had to that date.

I might just as well direct you via a link (I do not have this link handy at this moment, though if you press me I might be able to find it) to an interview I have in mind with a surviving Japanese "Zero" pilot who states, among other things, that the maximum effective operational ceilings of later-model "Zero's" were no greater than 11,000+ feet--their propellers couldn't bite efficiently into the thinner atmosphere found at greater altitude.

This is not new information to anyone familiar with the subject, is surely an important item of detail, yet this is studiously ignored by the UV model, and, I would suppose, the WitP model down the road.

It also makes hash of the "superior-altitude" bonus "Zeroes" are afforded over the P-39 in UV.

Let me digress.

Did the "Zero" have an altitude advantagte over the P-39?

Well, due to its lack of a mechanical supercharger (in the 1930's the Army balked at funding this technology) the early model of the Army's P-39 tended to perform okay at altitudes up to 11,800 feet (with an absolute operational ceiling of 15,000 feet) but lost power when driven higher.

The Allison designation of the later-war XP-39 Airacobra's engine was V-1710-E2 (the only liquid-cooled engine to see wide use in the war, a great performer and found on various fighters to include the P-38, the P-40, etc.) and this turbocharged powerplant produced its rated 1150 hp up to 25,000 feet; unfortunately, the V-1710-35, which powered early-production Airacobras, only had a rated altitude of 11,800 feet, above which Aircobras lost power.

All in all Allison's later engines were as good and in some respects better (more rugged) than the Rolls-Royce Merlin jobs as they could stand higher RPM, and that was without incorporation of the British two-stage turbocharger cooling technology.

Back to the main point: all this says that the Aircobra could and did operate decently at altitudes up to 12,000 feet (not the 10,000 implied by UV) while proving itself in all theatres (especially Russia) to be a very good performer in ground-support roles (in other words lower altitudes), which is why we tend to think of it as more of a "fighter-bomber" as opposed to a "fighter-interceptor" aircraft.

Meanwhile, UV has the "Zero" flying around performing acrobatic feats at outrageous altitudes in comparison to the P-39 the whereas the reality is that A6M2 performance was seriously degraded above 10,000 feet, and effective operational ceilings with the later -3 and -5 models rose only to a bare 12,000 feet tops.

The P-39's worst (hardest to master) characteristic in fighter-to-fighter engagements was probably the relatively disparate nature of its armament: the 37mm cannon firing through the propeller hub, the twin .50 calibers on the cowling and the four .30 calibers on its wings all shot projectiles of different muzzle velocities and thus deflection shooting became even more problematical for the pilot. Still, like all American frontline aircraft the P-39 was built like a brick tihshouse and its pilots more often than not arrived back home in one piece in spite of the plane's powerplant shortcomings early in the war.

No one in possession of the facts would argue against that, though no doubt there are those in this forum who will choose to ignore what I've written. (I haven't bothered to go back and read all of Mdiehl's work, and for all I know I'm echoing his two-year running argument ad nauseam point by point.)

Please note that the UV model does not seem to be aware of and in no manner acknowledges the A6M2 "Zero's" own flight limitations at altitudes over 10,000 feet (some 11,000+ feet for the A6M3's and -5's), instead models reverse aeronautical dynamics by imagining (errantly) that the "Zero's" handling advantage over the P-39 increased at altitudes over 10,000 feet when in fact it began to erode.

The "Zero" was superior to the P-39 in terms of handling agility at lower altitudes and reduced air speed (i.e., under 10,000 feet and less than, say, 250 mph) not higher altitudes and greater speeds, whereas the P-39 remained what it always was, a decent but underpowered, unspectacular performer from ground level right on up to its effective operational ceiling.

To state this differently, the Aircobra wasn't particularly effective in any role other than ground support (most especially as a tank killer in Russia) but at any altitude up to around 12,000 feet its performance tended to be consistently adequate.

The P-39's inability to climb rapidly and its loss of power over the 12,000-15,000 range made it a poor choice for the fighter-interceptor role as bombers could stay out of its path merely by maintaining greater altitude, while "Zero" escorts enjoyed certain maneuvering advantages in one-on-one engagements at low and medium altitudes.

Again: this reality is held to be inconsequential according to the UV model; that model, as presented to the player, is confused on the subject.

In point of fact, the Japanese "altitude bonus" in the UV model with respect to "Zeroes" not only gets it wrong but stands near diametrical opposition to aeronautical-engineering reality and as an unhappy result skews air events in favor of the Sons of Nippon, an old, consistent and in my home at least regretable theme in Gary's games.

And tell me, if that's dubious enough what happens once these modest Aircobras and Warhawks and Wildcats are superceded by Corsairs and the Hellcats? Are we likely to find any similar "Zero" altitude penalty for A6M3's and A6M5's flying at altitudes higher than 11,000+ feet against those American airplanes?

Dream on.

And we haven't even gotten to the stage of WWII where the Thunderbolt (P-47 "M" and "N" models in the Pacific) and Mustang (P-51) take a bow.

Sure, the "Zero" could turn inside everyone else, and a good thing or it wouldn't have lasted past noon! The "Zero" was also a superb climber (at low and medium altitudes) and I won't be the least surprised if the WitP model employs that characteristic in isolation as a means to render later models of "Zeroes" more equal performers against, for example, the relatively sluggish P-47, which, as it turns out, could not climb a lick--poor thing.

Of the course the total reality regarding the "Zero"/P-47 comparison includes the little nicety that altitude was not always a "Zero's" best friend because once the A6M3 or -5, for instance, rose above 11,000+ feet (10,000 for the A6M2) their controls became more unresponsive and power was lost, plus the P-47 was in other important respects relative to combat (build quality, speed, dive ability, armament and overall flying characteristics ) an utterly superior aircraft to any "Zero," but then reality in this forum, especially of the "total" variety, is a commodity of the most personal kind.

To sum up: nowhere does Gary's UV model even suggest these "total realities," seems instead content to simply ignore them selectively wherever this might further its seeming pro-Japanese "purpose," which amounts to nothing more than a faulty design philosophy bolstered by home-boy commentary of the tepid "That sounds reasonable to me" variety.

In fact, Gary's model misses a whole of lot of the war's realities, but let's confine ourselves here and now only to discussion of the air module.

[TIMJOT]

I'd say that the P40 was an all around better plane than the Zeke, based on performance characteristics. Hard data on combat losses of Zekes and P40s in mutual combat is, however, difficult to come by.

I would say in theory the P-40 was an all around better plane than Tte Zeke, but, operational and tactical circumstances mitigated the technical superiority they may have enjoyed in the first 6 months of the war. Hard data can be hard to come by, but by compiling various souces*. I have come up with approximately 2:1 kill ratio in favor of the Zeke for the first 6 months. This is not an indication of aircraft inferiority but rather an indication of certain pilot, tactical and operational handicaps encountered early in the war. Again these handicaps should be modeled somehow, in the game.

* "They Fought With What They Had" (Edmunds)
"The Fall of the Philipines" (Morton)
"The Army Airforces in WWII; Early plans & Ops (Craven&Cate)
"Samurai" (Sakai)

[Tristanjohn]

Hi, UV/WITP use manuverabilty for aircraft data. If I was to rerate aircraft what should I use? (It will still be called Mvr but will include data other then just turn rates. I'll add as many factors as needed and then divide the total number of inputs for final rating.)

Example: Dive 35 Turn 36 Climb 32 Roll 37 =Mvr rating of 35

How do we define a numerical rating?

Make a commitee to assign values for each aircraft.

Just "maneuver" didn't cut it, doesn't cut it and never will cut it, not with other factors such as speed and altitude and whatnot incorporated into the air model. That is what I mean when I say the air model needs to be gutted, or if you prefer "rewritten" from scratch. It just doesn't make sense and never will in its present iteration for the reason there exists no single "maneuver" rating for any plane for any period of air warfare. The present air model isn't sophisticated enough to begin to take into consideration all the various factors involved, and at any rate it tries not at all to get at truth but rather paints its perculiar vision of World War II happily away with Gary's same old pro-Japanese brush.

It's absurd.

Mogami, you must be familiar with the adage, "You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear." Well, that's essentially what's happening with regard to the air model and this wish to somehow resurrect the "maneuver" rating.

That's not on the cards.

Now take that unpleasant message back to the developers and see if you can come up with a better idea.

[Tristanjohn]

That others see things from another point of view, I don't have any problems with. Most resources I've put my eyes upon - and that's not few - support the view that the Zero had an edge over the Wildcat. The only chance of getting the Matrix team to tune down its capabilities would be to provide enough hard facts to convince them that they've given it to much of an edge.

This isn't about Matrix or "the team," at least not primarily. It's about Gary.

Debates over such issues are never ending, just search the web for 'the best fighter plane of WWII' and you're on!

Not in serious (academic) fora.

Throwing in terms like Axis sympathesizer and other irrelevant phrases only pi$$es people of.

Well now, that's just too bad, isn't it? People, as usual, don't mind acting in a certain way but the moment they're called on it it's "Katie, bar the door!"

I've not read a single statement that can be said to support such attitudes regarding this discussion yet.

Then I'd say you labor under a reading disability.

I have learned a lot about the Zero, Wildcat and other facts related to them and the airwar in the Pacific from in these threads, so such discussions are educating as long as they are kept on a serious and well formulated level.

Some of "us" endeavor to do just that. Others do not.

[mdiehl]

I would say in theory the P-40 was an all around better plane than Tte Zeke, but, operational and tactical circumstances mitigated the technical superiority they may have enjoyed in the first 6 months of the war. Hard data can be hard to come by, but by compiling various souces*. I have come up with approximately 2:1 kill ratio in favor of the Zeke for the first 6 months.

I see nothing to question about your findings based on what I know. That all seems roughly consistent with the things that I've read and with my overall impression of the circumstances in which the P40 and A6M were engaged for the first half year of the war. I'd be interested in the breakdowns of your loss ratios by theater if you can do that.

Ya know, the funny point about all this is that the discussion is rather moot in re the application of the model to the game. Matrix knows of these calculations. Reading Mogami's AARs, I am not ready to agree with Tristanjohn that Matrix or Grigsby have ignored the loss ratio stats. Mogami, after all, seems to achieve results around 1:1 in the F4F-Z6M dustups and, incredibly, seems to do pretty well with the P39s. Soudns to me like when the logistical situation for the Allied a/c is decent, they hold their own right well. And that is as it should be.

[mogami]

Hi, From tests conducted by US at Wright Patterson Field.


Powerplant - Type: One Nakajima Sakae 31 radial piston engine
Horsepower: 1,130

Performance - Max. Speed: 557 km/h (346 mph) at 6000m (19,685 ft.)

Their blurb on the Zero (illinois Insitute of Technology)
"Japanese naval aviators flew 328 combat-ready Zeros against American forces at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines. The Zero totally outclassed all Allied fighter aircraft for the first six months of the war until American carrier forces stopped the Japanese in the Coral Sea and at Midway in May and June 1942."


Besides the "don't turn with a Zero" I am also finding "Don't climb to a Zero" It seems if the Zero has an altitude advantage the proper tactic was to stay away while climbing. Then use your faster speed and dive on the Zero.
However I'm also seeing that turning and climbing and diving do not occur all the time. Often it is simply fighters (either side) shooting enemy fighters that do not even know they are under attack. (This is where the climbing, diving, rolling, turning become important for survivers)