Could not agree more.
I am a World War Two airplane junky. I have played online PvP air to air combat, honestly, before Video Cards were added. The Two I knew then were WarBirds and Air Warrior. Warbirds required a telnet connect, which I could not figure out back then, so I went with AirWarrior. I played the heck of that. We finally got Video cards and for the first time you could play full screen and there were textures for the “shapes” Win EA bought out Air Warrior and buried it. I made the Switch to Aces High.
Aces is still out there at “hitechcreations.com”. Free software, one to two free to play arenas, but their bread and butter was always a subscription to play.
Those earlier “games” were Flight Sims first and “games” second.
WB reversed this. it is Game first and a Flight Sim LAST, if even that.
It took me 6 weeks of hair pulling frustration and out and out online RESEARCH to learn how to make the input from a JOYSTICK useable. It was a nightmare. There is no real help from Gaigin at all. Does anyone remember “User Manuals”. If there is one I haven’t found it.
That said I ran into a lot of info on Gaigin. Russian Company. Thus, anything American or British will not work right at one point or another.
The most heinous mess is the BR rating. Because of that If I fly my P-38E, which was entering Service when Pearl Harbor struck, because of the twisted BR rating I have to fly against Turbo Props that never even flew in World War Two at all, YET I never see the ME 262 which did.
Twisted, and I don’t think it is accidental.
The Turbocharger. P-38s had them from the pototype on. The biggest headache for all new pilots to the P-38s from the YP all the way to the L model was that the pilot have to manually adjust the Turbo, Mixture, Cooling Flaps and a few other things, all of which had to be dealt with just to change the throttel setting. One of the major breakthoughs of the L was that it was all sychned to the throttel.
Turbo Charges. One of only two US fighters so equipped. I have not gotten to test flying the P-47s so I cannot attest to them in this. But the P-38 is completely trashed. One the BR rating is a ridiculous mess. Second you can not manuall control the turbocharger. The controls in the cockpit don’t even move if you go to WEP. Worse Early P38s did not even have WEP which was injection of alcohol or water into the combustion chamber to enhance the power of the piston.
BUT, Pilots who masterd the manual turbocharging settings could do wonders from 30,000 feet, If the temperatures were high enough, all the way to the deck.
Yet you don’t even have them on the plane at all. Oh the animation is there on the outside, but they don’t do anything. This is like flying the 222 modle of the P-38 the British demanded.
The 222, no counterotation of engines, (too much work they said). NO supercharging at all, let alone the Turgocharger. THEN they bitched that the plane wasn;t good enough. LOCKheed did not even want to sell it to them and it was LOCKHEED and Kelly Johnson who dubbed that POS the “Castrated Lightning”.
That’s what we are flying in WB. I went through this morning for a number of hours going throught “Full Realistic Engine Control” just to get to to control those turbos. Nope, nothin, NADA. They I go here,P-38L-5-LO - War Thunder Wiki, and I then go through all the P-38 pages and learn that Gaigin has castrated all the p-38s! Turbo has no ability to control it, and it’s effects are not felt in Game.
I have run into one mess after another of Gaigin presenting what ammounst to “fantasy gaming” when it comes to aircraft. Mostly in the form of the BR rating.
That mess is the biggest headache of all because you wind up flying older models of World War Two air craft against aircraft the did not fly in World War Two, thus completely negating the real benefit of picking a given aircraft. What ever it may have been in the real world is out and out ignored for “Play Balance”
In the case of American World War Two planes they are almost always, “Play balanced” so bad that you fly P-38Es from very early '42 against Turbo Prop aircraft from late 1946, OR you fly against aircraft of which like NONE were made and they were all Prototypes. The Japanese A7M1 being a prime cuplprit.
So like Willaim I began to wonder why. Well,… it isn’t an accident. The Game Works as designed. The design itself is based on and Gaigin goes out of their way to make play so, on their idea that America’s and Great Britain’s weren’t really all that much to write home about.
So, P-38s don’t actually have the turboscharges they really had and you have to fly the E model which I don’t think ever served in combat squadrons against a weird beast like the WYVERN, which in IT"s historical context was a totaly failure.
There is no B-17 G for instance. Just some wierd notation of a B-17 E/L “L” i presume means “late modle B-17E”. Not even in the game.
The time I have wasted on War Thunder, and each time running into a brick wall that prevents me from doing with the planes I like to fly that I should be able to do has left me very happy tha this is FreeWare.
But I will never give Gaigin a dime of my own money. To pay for this would be a complete rip off.
cya out there. I wish the P-38 weren’t castrated. I HOPE the P-47 isn’t, those who fly it with Full realistic engine controls will know for sure. But this is a mess. A real unsupportable mess.
Is’t sad to see this kind of bias in a game that purports to be “realistic”. WT isn’t. Its a fantasy game somewhat less enjoyable than the old game “Crimson Skies”.