You probably shouldn’t spend your lifetime there. But nowadays it shouldn’t be immediate radiation sickness level either. I’d imagine it’s similar to the not so bad areas of the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
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Beautiful shots @komemiute, that’s one helluva wide screen you got there. Great for keeping tabs of what’s happening besides you, not so great for checking six high eh? 
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It’s actually three screens, so I do have the frames that break up the screen.
I love doing CAS with this setup, and I wish it’d work with Elite too.
Checking six is not too bad, if it wasn’t for the extreme angle that makes the Track IT spaz out on me.
With a bubble canopy, a la F18 or F16 or even A10 is much MUCH better.Theoretically the P51 too, but I just can’t seem to keep it’s energy high enough or keep it from high speed stalls…
TL;DR: It’s the man, not the machine, and I’m a terrible pilot. 
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With those warbirds the trick is to pull veeery gently. You should hardly ever pull the stick to the stops. This goes for the turkeybird as well.
Often the tightest turn is not actually what you need to gain a favourable position. As the blue 109 so effectively demonstrated, wide climbing sweeps can rule the sky just as hard as the rata’s dime turns.
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Dunno, it was those tight scissor you pulled that truly got me, every time.
I lack in BFM,
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WE!!
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In scissors it’s quite easy to pull too hard. It is a thing you can exercise with the AI. You want to make sure the bandit stays in front of your 9-3 line. The best turn can sometimes be a pretty lazy one.
This guy describes it better than I could, watch it while doing a simple chore
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This. Smooth stick movements rule the day, plus a healthy dose of rudder pedal. If you spend a lot of time with jets, you tend to forget how important the rudder is, especially with aircraft like the Bug that don’t have much rudder authority to begin with.
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Tomcat however is flown with all your appendages. And none of them should be used harshly. Like in racing, fast looks slow. So in flying, gentle easy curves are more efficient than harsh bat turns made by booting the thing like a mongrel dog.
I like to think tomcat is the jet that really taught me how to fly (virtual airplanes). It reacts pretty darn badly to the wrong sort of inputs, but rewards right behavior with stunning performance.
To see if what you are doing is working, look outside your pit. Not at the bandit, but at the sky and land. You should be able to get an idea of how fast you are turning (turn rate) by looking at that. See how a harsh pull gives you a quick, short burst of high rate, then nothing.
When I’m fighting I’m not always looking at the bandit. I look at the sky, look in my pit (fuel gauge!) look at the bandit, scan for other bandits, etc. And still I suck
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Fighting last night was interesting in the various planes. I felt I learnt more in the spitfire than any of the others. The slower pace and the difference in rhythm and having time to assess and process what is happening is really interesting.
The hornet and faster planes just degenerates into me turning and bleeding off all my energy.
The spit chasing @schurem in the sabre was a prime example. I had zero cards to play except wait for you to forget I was there and pounce on you when you got slow enough after you killed @komemiute. It may not of looked like it but I had a plan for that.
It all stemmed from @Franze saying “remember your strengths” while I was climbing up to you. Great advice and I got myself into a tactically “easy” setup for it after that. It’s very informative when you get a simple win like that. Its interesting stuff this BFM. Even though we are just messing around its really having teachable moments for me
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The Turkey just punishes you when you forget the basics; the others don’t let you know until you’re toast. It’s also got that sweet cockpit that emphasizes what’s going on a lot better than other aircraft.
The Bug in particular can teach some bad habits because of the extreme AoA authority it has. That makes it fairly good in a tight turning fight… For a while. Issue usually becomes when someone doesn’t play that game, like a Viper, and they bring the fight into a high speed vertical where the Bug has difficulty competing. Against something like the Fulcrum, the Bug loses out because the Fulcrum can leverage an extreme acceleration and speed advantage on top of the AoA advantage.
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Yeah I remember tearing bugs to pieces with a 29. Still, had I never flown the tomcat, I wouldn’t have been as successful or graceful with it.
Funny how a spitfire just gets outrun and outclimbed by the 109. Is there some finesse with the engine we’re missing?
Speaking of engine finesse, it’s easy in most planes to get too fast in a fight. Going downhill in rolling scissors for example. Another area where the bug gives negative training with its pathetic engines.
When tangling with sabres in a MiG-15 I often fly about one third of the time with extended dive brakes just to keep from overshooting while still keeping the engine spooled up.
The Kurfürst is a much later production plane (1944 vs. 1942 i think) and it specifically owns climb rate, so that’s just the way it goes, AFAIK.
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@sobek already got it, the Bf-109K-4 is a late war aircraft, from Fall of '44 and later. It wasn’t seen in numbers until Bodenplatte. MW50 injection, much more powerful engine, streamlined airframe. The Bf-109G-6 would be more evenly matched with the Spitfire LF Mk IX as simulated, but it would also be able to hang onto a turn better than the K. The Spitfire is roughly a 1943 equivalent, with the old rounded tail and C wing along with a weaker engine. Still more maneuverable with a tighter turning radius, but inferior in climb and speed. The clipped wing version is a bit better in speed while having reduced turn and climb, but better roll and more than capable of turning with just about anything. There’s not much that can compete with the 109 in climb rate though; the G-6 had a rate of 17m/s (3,300ft/min) and it was superior to even the late war allied fighters. The K-4 could make it to 32,000ft in about 8 minutes thanks to the boost. Take that away and it’s roughly G-6 equivalent (which is about what I was doing most of the time yesterday, to avoid overheating the engine).
Big problem with the Spitfire is it’s very easy to overheat the engine, so you have to watch boost and prop RPM like a hawk. If you go vertical at full power, you’ll fry the engine. Max continuous is 2650RPM at +7 boost. You can hang on the prop fairly well with reduced power, but you’ll have to dance on the rudder pedals to keep from snapping over.
The MiG-15 and I have an agreement: I don’t go into fast dives and it doesn’t mach tuck me. Extremely hard to abide by that agreement at altitude!
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I haven’t spent enough time with the mig 15. Its lovely but when I fly the sabre and the 15 back to back. The sabre “feels” better. This probably doesn’t translate to “fights” better but I feel more in control and less like I’m in a fight with the air frame.
The F-86 is more forgiving, but the MiG-15 has more options. It’s generally faster, climbs better, turns better, and has better performance at altitude. Where it has issues is at speed, because it has a nasty mach tuck tendency (and this is a greater problem at altitude). So the F-86 can dive away and take better pot shots due to the weapons, while the MiG-15 has to get in a good position, but when it does… Well, the pair of 23mm and lone 37mm were made to shoot down B-29s, so you can imagine what that does to a little F-86.
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How did you manage to skid across the desert floor yesterday, anyways? Was that mach tuck or blackout?
Worse, bad judgement of room left. 
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You guys might enjoy this, it’s last weeks’ SATAL 1v1 bfm tournament.
One of the commenters, Paco, really knows his stuff.
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