There is no state to which the Flanker ingame can replicate that turn. 24 degrees per second, or completing a 360 in 15 seconds like in the video is probably only possible if you’re on literal seconds of fuel left, and that’s with afterburner.
The thing is, we can clearly see that the Flanker in the video does NOT use afterburner. Let’s say that the Flanker in the video has about 5 minutes of flying time left without AB when it performed the 360-degree turn, which should be reasonable as we could see the Flanker transitioning into another maneuver before the video cuts abruptly to it landing. Speed-wise, it couldn’t have entered the turn more than mach 1 (it’s at an airshow), and since the maneuver is a tight circle at an airshow, it is either min-radius turn (which would mean the Flanker is flying slow; probably around 4-500km/h to complete the circle as tight as it can) or max rate turn (Max rate speed of the Flanker can’t be higher than 700 km/h) that the Flanker is performing.
Regarding speed bleed, with assumed five minutes of fuel like in the video in air RB, clean config, you’re not even close to that level of performance as I highlighted above. If you try to sustain 24 degrees per second, entering at a speed of around 700 km/h (which is the optimistic figure) without afterburner you’d be stalling before completing the circle in War Thunder. Compare that with the video, where you can clearly see the Flanker remaining stable enough and having enough energy to climb to the left and perform consecutive barrel rolls, something that isn’t possible in the game.
And according to this table, the Su-27 using max power AB, 14 minutes of fuel, clean configuration can only sustain 22.33 degrees per second maximum. Without AB this figure would be much lower, and this discrepancy isn’t something that the fuel load can make up.
This may not be relevant for the report because the aircraft performing the maneuvers in the video will not be outfit with a full missile combat load and the fuel stated in that chart. If the performance with less weight, no stores, and lower fuel is not extrapolated properly by Gaijin it will underperform in-game… which was expected.
Look, I agree the FM is laughable at low speeds, we even have a report from Giovanex proving that.
But again, we don’t know the fuel load. He could have like 3 minutes left when going into the turn, as it is near the end of the show. We don’t know if this plane has been stripped down or not (there is probably a way to verify this). And most importantly, we don’t know what speed he went into the maneuver with and what speed he came out with. Meaning, we don’t know if it was a sustained turn or not (he could have just burned 200 km/h in that turn). You can’t compare sustained turn figures to the turn time in this clip.
Unless you can get a decent approximation of his initial and out of turn speeds, dig up some info on the weight of the aircraft, and have a big enough margin (in-game vs clip), you will not get far.
Hell, I did a very rough test with a wobbly turn. 27SM, 7 min fuel, nothing on the pylons, chaff/flare loaded, full gun ammo. Went into the turn with 680 km/h and left with 330 km/h. Completed in ~17 seconds.
Normally, 2-3 second difference for a full turn is a lot, but with so many variables unknown, I doubt we can make a meaningful bug report.
In-game war thunder with 10s fuel (frozen) is underperforming compared to the video by about ~2 deg/s it seems, I’ll re-test and record rather than running the stopwatch on my phone for exact results.
Isn’t 10 minutes quite a lot, though? The figures in the manual are given for around 7-8 minutes of fuel. The guy in the video also seems to be doing the turn at the end of his flight program, so he might have quite a bit less.
I couldn’t get it in under 19s starting from ~550 km/h (340mph) and ending 270 km/h (167mph).
Moreover, there is no speed I can start this maneuver at on mil thrust where the plane maintains “control”. It is always on the verge of stalling. It cannot complete a “quick” turn in such a manner without being on the edge of departure.
Starting at 740 km/h (450 mph) and ending at 300km/h (187mph) the aircraft makes the turn in no less than 17s.
Does anyone have the aerobatics manual for the Su-27? I have the one for the MiG-29. I think it may be worth taking a look at some very basic maneuvers per the manuals to see if they are even possible in-game. I’d hazard a guess that this isn’t the case.
Nz/Ny thing was related to other aircraft overperforming thought, MiG-29 and Su-27 charts were used fine (they both use the same overload as the local host, no issue there)
I’m quite confident thrust is overperforming in the in game flanker, which means that drag is too high to somewhat adjust sustained turn with afterburner on. The way to test this would be to sustained a turn with a constant Ny=5G turn from 500kph to 700kph. If the aircraft over performs in the test (aka accelerates faster than it should), that means (since sustained turn is more or less (more less than more) matching with afterburner on) that the aircraft thrust is too high and induced drag also too high, which helps the aircraft when doing slight turns but kills his SEP when pulling hard.
If someone can do the test (start turn from 500kph, keep turning at 5G looking at localhost until one reaches ~750kph while recording) it would be greatly appreciated, since without a stick (I don’t have one) doing this is close to impossible. Configuration is 2 R-73, 2 R-27R with 18900kg total mass. Once in test flight one can adjust the mass here: http://localhost:8111/editor/fm_commands.html
In general also remember that flanker carries a lot of fuel and engines aren’t too thirsty in afterburner, compared to something like the F-16C you can start the match with 60% of the fuel you would use on the 16C and have somewhat equal endurance. A minute of fuel in the flanker is a lot of kg, it greatly helps performance.
