I’m extremely frustrated right now. Allow me to explain why.
For quiet some time now I have been finally trying to consciously get better at flying props in ARB. As someone who didn’t have much interest in military aviation before starting to play War Thunder, I find it incredibly hard to distinguish between different variants of a certain aircraft.
For example:
There are 5 Bf 109 variants at 4th rank of the German tech tree. To be honest they all look identical to me.
The issue arises when I want to compare their performance to each other and decide on which one is best. To my annoyance there is almost no information that I can use to do that. There is no engine horsepower nor is there an indicator of how much the aircraft weights in the statcard. No information on the optimal turn speed, no mention of engine performance at different altitudes, no info on how much the aircraft compresses in a dive, not even propeller efficiency is mentioned. Now normally I wouldn’t be against just spading every single one of the Bf 109s to see how the series performs in relation to each other. Unfortunately, spotting the minuscule differences in their flight models is not something I can do.
So anyways it’s not possible to determine and compare the exact aircraft characteristics in-game. No big deal, right? There’s always outside resources that contain all the info in the world and then some. Now I can finally tell apart the gorillion Bf 109 variants.
Except that this is not the case. There aren’t that many resources out there from what I could find, and those that do exist are either outdated, incomplete or are not very useful in general. Most of them are just spreadsheets, which in addition to being incomplete, are a bit difficult to read. I love spreadsheets and all, but I prefer such information in a more visual format like graphs.
There is this one website I found which calculates the power to weight ratio of propeller aircraft: https://wtapc.org/
At least now I know the relative power to weight ratio and supercharger gear stages of my variants. Except that this is literally the only useful info I can get out of this graph. For example, if I wanted to compare two different airframes, the resulting graphs wouldn’t be of any use to me since the propeller efficiency is not taken into account. Outside of that, there’s statshark, but they only do jets since that’s all that people care about nowadays apparently.
In conclusion, this ended up being more of a rant than anything else. Personally, this learning experience is extremely frustrating and almost makes me want to throw in the towel. Have you ever felt the same way? If so, how did you eventually get better? If you have any advice for me or maybe some resource I might have missed, please share it with me.
