I’ve been flying F8F a lot and my experience flying it gives me the best subjective supercharger gear switch at around ~1.5-1.7 km altitude depending on the map/climate/weather (usually intuited by noting my IAS starting to drop and then waiting 100 more meters) (I found I gotta supercharge earlier on hotter maps vs colder ones, which makes sense as far as I understand what it does)
I do notice though that this does lead to a very hot engine, as I assume air is still dense enough to cause some over-boosting. If I swap gears over 2.5 km, the heating issues dont appear but climb performance suffers so I swap at 1.5-1.7
However, the wiki says you should swap supercharger gear as low as 1.1 km. At 1.1 km WEP, I’m still climbing very quickly and my IAS is stable.
Am I just having subjective perceptions and should just trust the wiki on when to gear switch, or is this one of the flight model changes that are not represented there?
The MEC chart implies a value in between the wiki and what I found (altho data is for 1B rather than -1. For some reason the chart omits -1’s WEP climb despite it having more than enough ADI in my experience to climb to altitude, disengage and re-enable during dogfights before I run out of bullets or need to RTB due to damage anyway):
(note: the MEC chart also seems outdated in its ideal climb speeds according to reddit when I asked a different question there. This I did experience - climbing faster when going for IAS of 280 over the 250 written here.)
Pretty sure that google doc is massively out of date (note the absence of higher tiers, new nations, and especially the “tested on version” column …lots of 1.77 and we’re on 2.37 at this time ).
Case in point, you mention the lack of WEP info for the F8F-1 – it originally* didn’t have WEP, which I assume is why it isn’t in that spreadsheet. (It gained WEP ability several years ago).
It may be ok for some planes that haven’t changed much over the years, but there’ll be some figures that are probably quite wrong.
(* technically it may have had WEP at the very start (before I got it), but it got removed for a long time (when I finally got it and used it) before getting it back again)
Is there anything you might recommend for more up to date optimal MEC values I could use? Other than local host stuff - I only have a single monitor - that is.
Google seems to only ever give me results from 8 or so years ago or dead forum pages from reddit links.
No idea on the MEC values sorry, as I don’t use MEC. Other than a personal contentment I don’t really think they achieve much in AirRB overall. In Sim I think they’d much more useful. But that’s just my opinion :)
When you mention localhost … if you’re meaning the localhost port 8111 information then you can try out WTRTI (WarThunder Real Time Information (I think)). That will place a lot of the aircraft aero/mechanical values that you get via the localhost into the same screen as the game, and similar to how the throttle/spd/alt/ammo/etc info displays. So much more convenient than a separate screen.
Just do some searching up on “wtrti” to see a heap more detail about it.
And, for what it’s worth, I found MEC to make day and night differences for american props in terms of climb rate, dive performance (both deccel and accel) and overheating issues. Only time the ovencat has heat issues with MEC for me is when I forget to switch super gears.
So but most importantly with US Props and MEC if u have no auto Prop Pic control: when at level flight up to say 5 degrees or in ANY dive use this as guide for pic control;
as long as US plane in dive and if I’m below or near 300kph I’ll drop prop pitch to 60’s then raise to 90 once at 400kph, then lower again if I have time…seems to be fastest way to get American planes to get those big motors to spin those big as props when near speeds below 300kph…again though when accelerating not in any short of CLIMB
In general, the benefits of MEC in RB aren’t always obvious but taking the bf 109 F-4 as an example, the MEC settings look like they have no meaningful impact… until you start using WEP. Instead of the Auto engine management closing your radiator completely heat spiking your engine into red flashing and then slamming open to 100% the second you disengage WEP. The MEC option controls the heat giving you a much longer continuous WEP and when you release it it doesn’t jump to 100% radiator creating an airbrake. You can use this to stay in the yellow for about 10 minutes, orange = 3 minutes and red = 1 minute. When the engine starts to lower the overheat threshold, simply get the engine white for about 60-90 seconds (3 minutes for more extreme over heating) and it will undo lowering of the overheat threshold.
It really depends on what your looking for MEC to do for you. Simplifying MEC is always preferred vs. overwhelming yourself with too many options. By simply controlling your radiators, even with a fixed value, is usually always better than Auto engine control.
I’m currently updating this guide but its pretty accurate still. I’m about half way through revising the American tree. Some things I’ve found so far is they have fixed overheating issues with some planes like the P-51 and the broken radiator on the P39N-0 but they left it broken on the p-39Q-5 when they are identical radiators. Also, the P63s have been “fiddled” with for whatever undisclosed reason since the last test flight i did with them. Ill update the guide by nation over the next month or so.
To be fair, some one at gaijin has been fixing some of the flight models from what I’m seeing. There is still a lot that needs adjusting but it’s a good start.
The arbitrary reduction of engine heat threshold when just operating at any capacity is very frustrating. The p47s suffer an arbitrary 10 deg C over 15 min no matter what. So at 15 min into the game your radiator limit gradually goes from 255 to 245 deg C no matter what you do.
Fixing the above and the incorrect setting for the radiators would be great.