How come according to this image it cannot sustain flight above mach 2, when the aircraft was fully capable of 2.2?
Light combat load is probably why.
Weather conditions could be part of it - jet aircraft performance better at lower temperatures.
Also that graph appears to be max reheat power, rather than combat power.
Max reheat would permit maximum speed, no? Combat is no reheat.
The light vs heavy combat load seems to have no noticeable difference - I do not see how clean vs light would drop 0.3-0.4 mach off the top speed.
Combat power in the Tornado refers to a setting above max reheat which raises some of the engine limiters to provide additional thrust for a short amount of time (up to 5 mins is permitted)
I can find no record of this - do any of the existing sources mention it?
The PA200 source above talks of combat power, but the only visible difference is that it takes twice the distance to reach 650kts on combat, when relative to max reheat
Light Combat is 4 SW + Pylons.
Heavy Combay is 4 SW + Pylons + 4 Skyflash
Look at the loadouts, 4 embedded sky flashes aren’t going to have a huge difference.
However are four sidewinders draggy enough to drop the top speed by 0.4 mach? And in the case of the in-game Tornado, are the engines modelled based on max reheat, or combat?
4 Sidewinders + the wing pylons, which are pretty hefty. Combat thrust would probably improve things slightly as flame has said.
Max reheat, combat isn’t modelled.
Interesting - how come this is present where soviet jets, for example, are all assumed to be at their highest reheat setting even if said setting would have had a 3-5 minute limit?
Only one that springs to mind was the MIG-21Bis which was running at combat thrust as its max reheat, which was removed.
Was it removed? I wasn’t aware
Yes once it was discovered a report was made and the combat power was taken away.
Though that might be a good mechanic at some point to actually have modeled. prehaps along side variable reheat