General Japanese & JASDF General Discussion

Or they don’t even exist after WWII

U.S.A. Testing documents tend to be interesting. Funny enough on most axis aircraft the last test they did was to try them on high octane gas. That tended to cause some fun issues but most Japanese planes handled it well. The ki-84 in game is based on the U.S.A. test data with the high octane gas apparently.

You would not know, and we know the archives exist, but are heavily restricted. So you can’t really make that claim when a single picture wins this argument, also, who eats chocolate pasta?

It looks like question is a little harder because for example on this photo on the side of the plane (I haven’t found it in better quality now) written on English that plane must be feeded with 91 octane fuel or some analogue. So looks like it is needed to see every test individually with what fuel it was done. Of course there also were tests with 100 octane

There aren’t any classified documents about WW2 vehicles and vehicles using and testing. All of them are declassified (except some weird examples becuase of some countries laws) Another issue is that archives at any country can have hard and bureaucratic system because of which at soem archives you has online access to the docs and even can ask to scan not scanned documents at another you need to go to the archive IRL. Here is also situation that some documents are missing in archives and owned by families of engineers and etc

4 Likes

I also remember there was a fiasco on the forms about the Test American Ki-84 using American spark plugs because the Japanese ones failed due to them basically being made out of old pots and the dreams of Foxes.

Japanese engines tended to be run with some really bad fuel that would even scare the Germans for most of the war. Pine oil was known to be used as ersatz in gas. Also Pine oil was used to fuel there own jet engine with gasoline being a starting fuel one of the reasons for jet engine development was because the fuel quality issue. Post war American jeeps where known to fail running on Japanese fuel. I am going to did up some documents and websites that talk about the fuel chemistry issues.

Talking about fuel here is a cool 3D object that would be cool to see in game a Japanese ww2 Gas can:


1 Like

Low-quality fuel was a problem in every country except the United States. It’s also worth remembering that Japan had a fuel problem as early as 1940.

I haven’t really learnt about fuel quality in Japan and I guess there are many interesting stories.
They had stocks of imported fuel from the US. They ran out of them soon. I read somewhere that Japan planned to get 100 octane fuel from oil extracted in Indonesia. Because of this they planned Homare engine to work on 100 octane fuel. However when they tried to refine the oil into fuel, they only got 87 octane no matter how much lead they added. This was most likely due to the quality and type of oil in Indonesia. When supplies from Indonesia were cut off due to the cutting of convoys significant problems with the amount of fuel started which led to the addition of various additives to dilute the fuel and increase its quantity.

Britain had good situation with high octane fuel at least in the second part of WW2 when they used 150 octane fuel, not always but it was in serial usage

1 Like

However, the fuel in Great Britain was made in the USA. Without US aid, Britain would likely have had lower-quality fuel. The USSR and the UK didn’t have the same fuel shortage problems as the Axis powers, but it was the Americans who produced high-quality fuel.

I read somewhere that the most important defense air squadrons in Japan were provided with the best fuel available, which was even of comparable quality to the American ones.

2 Likes

The 100 octane fuel came from captured aviation fuel stock in Indonesia. Japanese oil refiners did make special experiment batches of 100 and 120 octane fuel.

The UK on the other hand knew of the risks of relying on high octane fuel if somehow that got cut it would have been bad. Same reason you don’t run a sport car on bronze grade gas you don’t run a late war spitfire off of 90 - 100 octane gas. Your engine power would be garbage but you will cook your engine. UK would develop an engine that could handle basically the garbage you put in a lawnmower and have the power of a engine running on 150 octane gas. The engine would be built and used but not in a plane interestingly as a fire truck pump engine in New York.

Soviet fuel situation was special during the war lots of imports of high quality aviation gas but it was less important due to the bulk of the fights being at low altitudes where high octane is a bit less important. Japanese where also thinking this pre-war as both nations believed the next war would be with each other sooner then later in the sky’s of Mongolia and China.

Don’t know if this was true but some of the tail pipe smoke from Japanese planes where so bad some American pilots thought they had shot them down for the Japanese planes to fly back home. Smoke trails would also make Japanese planes easier to spot and track by American fighters. There was some chemistry document on captured Japanese gas but also the story of American jeeps failing on Japanese gas.

I heard about that too. During the Battle of Midway, when American fighters attacked Japanese planes, a cloud of smoke often emerged from the Japanese aircraft. Inexperienced American pilots thought they had shot down an enemy plane. However, this cloud of smoke was caused by the Japanese pilot opening the throttle more.

Now a days engine smoke is a little less important besides it means your jet engine is being inefficient. BVR battles don’t fully need you to visualize the enemy. But I doubt we will stop developing better engines with no to little smoke.

But cannons I think will stay just in case you get a little to close in certain mission profiles even in 6th gen fighers.

even in TAIC Manual it only has j2m2 in it
螢幕擷取畫面 2025-11-02 195144
image


mb theres also j2m3, but still dont have one with 30mm tho


All gone… still pending for the first one, I gave up

1 Like

Gaijin usually takes a while to implement changes like this.

Usually, they will spend 1-2 years checking that, and then there is might be 50% chance NAB again