So I’m a shill, and bought the neutered Black Friday pack (mainly because as it stood for me, it means the Black Prince was within price range).
I’d watched reviews of the P-61A-11, with people saying it’s garbage.
I really like it. It’s a challenge to use at its BR, but god is it fun. I use it for CAS and it needs to be used in conjunction with friendly fighters, but it’s a right hoot.
However, I am clueless about the radar. Does it work? If yes, how do I make it work? If not, how do I minimise the radar display?
I flew the TT version on an old inactive account 345 times - in Air RB, around 3-5 years ago. And back in those days (no contrails, no red square) the radar was the best regarding range and provided search cone at lower BR and extremely helpful to find enemies hiding in heavy clouds.
It was at those days on of the few aircraft able to kill Me 264s with manual turret use from below / from the side as the range of your 4 0.50 cals of 1.6 to 1.8 km allowed you to stay out of the defensive gunner angles.
To make your radar useful for Ground RB i recommend to get used to it in test flights as you find friendly aircraft there too. I remember at least 3 different settings of the radar display, you find some vids on yt regarding the differences. The size of the radar can be changed in the game settings.
The plane itself is rather very fragile, but it starts to shine if you are able to fly and to use your gunner simultaneously. The planes needs a patient pilot as you are dead as soon as you allow enemies to zoom climb behind and below you (so outside your gunner area) as the time you can fly inverted is very limited. Try to find the best MEC settings to use the full potential of the plane without cooking the engines.
If you like the plane: Try to ace it and max out the slot. The gunners get insanely strong with a lev 75 crew and an ace status. If you are able to dodge incoming fighters and start a start a scissor fight the ai gunner is able to kill them in seconds. Even in standard fight you have quite often kill steal attempts by your ai gunner…
If you lose the initiative - just run away at low alt - your turret (in manual use) is effective up to 2.4 km for guys behind you. You outrange every gun behind you, but watch out for this insane 37 mm in ITPs…
I can agree I got the P-61 a while ago and I couldn’t tell how to use the radar or what any part of it meant it took me like a month and a half to find out the basics and I still don’t understand most of it. I was (and probably still am) going to make a form with the idea of a small tutorial on radar.