lets take at what smin1080p said
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I think there’s not much use speculating anything without having the proper sources. And from what I’ve read, Regianne’s archives are closed for the time being.
I did find a very in-depth book on it, interesting things to note
m.494 was cursed with several issues causing it to crash several times.
It also had a faulty engine, and according to test pilot De Prato, rumor was that FIAT sabotaged the DB 605 engines meant for Macchi and Reggiane by delaying deliveries (possibly also sabotaging the engines themselves)
First crash was in 10 May '42, on the first flight, due to a landing gear leg not deploying properly requiring a belly land which consequently a prop strike, and possibly damaged the engine further.
It also didn’t help that m.494 Piaggio propellers were also faulty and didn’t maintain constant RPM, causing instability and possibly engine damage.
July 18 '42, De Prato (test pilot) tries to ferry m.494 to Guidonia but has to abort due to engine malfunction.
July 20 '42, they ferry m.494 to Guidonia, without completing landing gear tests to avoid missing the trials, and without a seal around the engine firewall, which caused exhaust to leak into the cockpit.
On the first take-off at Guidonia, before even clearing the airfield, the engine vibration caused the DB 605 water coolant loop tubing to crack and leak boiling water on De Prato’s leg, and overheating the engine, the only one they had, causing him to crash land m.494 yet again
July 20, during dive tests, the landing gear fairings detached when approaching 900 kph, damaging the aircraft, resulting in m.494 being sent back to Reggiane for repair and reinforcement
Semptember 23, there was yet another crash caused by engine ceasing to function during landing approach, resulting in yet another crash landing and prop strike, during the Guidonia trials, piloted by colonel Angelo Tondi
from October onwards, m.495 is sent to Guidonia and partakes in tests with the old prop, the VDM prop, and a new engine, requested to be tested by Germany. Sadly, no performance data is included.
It does specify:
- The engine is a DB 605-A1 with MW-50 water-methanol injection
- Different compression ratio
- German VDM prop
Important to note that the exact sentence regarding the 720 kph claim in level flight is “a German pilot assured that the anemometer’s needle touched, in horizontal flight, the 720 km/h mark”
Anemometer is the airspeed indicator. It does not say if it is indicated or true. It also doesn’t state the altitude. But the common sense here is that it is TAS. But alas, it’s not performance data.
m.495 also swapped the 12.7mm wing-mounted machine guns got swapped for MG151 20mm cannons
m.495 was later taken by Germany to Reichlin Experimental Center.
in Guidonia Experimental Center, in the serie-5 trials, (does not specify if it’s m.494, 945, or any mods of both) from the evaluation commission:
Serie 0 in game features a DB 605 A with 1310 HP at max power, and 1477 HP WEP/Takeoff, so using the Serie 0 to compare m.494 (mod 1. and mod.2) and m.495 is pointless, because Serie 0’s engine is nowhere as anemic as m.494 or 495 regardless of the VDM or not.
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If the airspeed indicator needle touched the 720 km/h mark…this means that the figure is an indicated air speed.
that’s what I would say but perhaps it had different instrumentation for test flights, who knows.
The figures I am quoting in-game for 5,900m are done by diving from 7km spawn in test flight and then letting plane decelerate to a point where it is not losing speed.
We cannot duplicate the real life testing procedure to the letter because we do not have a timeframe for how long they let the plane decelerate. It would be possible to get a higher measured top speed by 5-10 kph if the instrumentation at the time and timetable did not account for the last bits of declaration; i.e deceleration from 640-630 takes a long time.
this book was among those used for the original bug report.
As I stated in the post, the DB605A-1 paired with a MW-50 is really just a DB605AM.
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What is the date on the last chart though?
ok fair enough. Thank you.
You mean 1944? It’s the year in which they started mass production of fighter equipped with that engine.
The engine was in the work before that and the MM.495 received what was probably a prototype since the way it’s described seems exactly like a DB605AM
What primary source indicates that it’s a DB-605AM that was used in the Re.2005 MDM.495?
The test flight of the plane with the German built engine and prop is in June 10, 1943. This timeframe just doesn’t seem very likely when you consider that the earliest documentation of using MW-50 on a Bf.109G-4 in a test flight is from September, 1943. And according to “The Secret Horsepower Race” / Calum Douglas, the DB-605 was something of a flaming dumpster fire in basically all of the first half of 1943.
Assuming that the Re.2005 was equipped with MW-50 would require the following,
-
Major engineering problems for the DB-605 were solved by the middle of 1943. We can hand waive this as say that the engine shipped to them was basically a prototype held to the highest standards even if we have no proof.
-
The Germans prioritized the development of the Re.2005 over their own domestic designs due to the test flight occuring 3 months prior to the earliest available documentation of flight testing a Bf.109 with MW-50.
- An alternative is that the Bf.109 was tested prior to the available documentation and that none of the earlier documentation or even mention of the testing survived the war.
Either scenario is more unlikely than it is likely.
What DB605 are you talking about? The A or the AM version?
All of the serie 5 aircraft were equipped with a DB605A engines and so did some other german planes so I guess not all DB605A were flaming dumpsters. If you are talking about DB605AM then Idk.
Some books say the MM495 was give to the German and it was given a “special” DB605A. This special engine had modified compression rates and Methanol and water injection. It was never called DB605AM so we don’t have primary sources.
Why do we believe it was a prototype of a DB605AM? Because if you look at Daimler-Benz info on the engine it is literally stated that the DB605AM is a DB605A with modified compression rates and MW-50. So it makes sense that they didn’t tell the italian engineers that they gave it a DB605AM (since they wouldn’t know what it was), but instead told them the changes they made to that “special” engine.
Again, those changes match in a 1 for 1 the characteristics of the DB605AM. I don’t know why the German would test it on the Re2005 other than just test if a different fram would change the engine’s performance… or because if they broke it they wouldn’t lose an otherwise repourposable Bf109 frame.
However it seems to me pretty unlikely that the engine was something other than a prototype DB605AM because… seriously what other engine could it be?
We are trying to get the primary documentation for these changes and possibly some figures for the performance.
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I am talking about the DB-605 in general.
Hopefully the screenshots are in the correct order, but according to Calum Douglas translation of Luftwaffe meetings, the DB-605 was not performing well in 1943.
The engine was actually even worse in 1942. The Italians built engines were not special in the fact that they had to be de-rated.
And what primary sources do these books cite to make that claim? That is the crux of the issue. It seems that the MW-50 equipped engine claim is probably dubious given the timeframe for the test flight.
Did these authors just see that the German engine was labeled as “special” in Italian documents and just assume that meant it was equipped with MW-50?
I think it is just as likely, if not moreso, that the engine that Germans equipped it with was not equipped with MW-50, but instead incorporated the technical changes that were made in order to get the engine to run more reliably and not have to be de-rated.
It seems odds that the Germans would equip and test fly an Re.2005 with MW-50 before they even attempted to equip and test fly their own fighters with it. It’s an even more odd conclusion when you consider that the June 10th test flight date would mean that the Germans equipped the Re.2005 with MW-50 prior to concluding their own research into it.
As I’ve mentioned above…it is incredibly unlikely that the engine was a DB-605 AM.
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nothing of new?
There are manuals that discuss the different performance characteristics of the prototype, as well as many other books that mention this as well. (You can look at my suggestion of the re.2005MM.495VDM)
For example:
“Przemysław Skulski – Reggiane Re.2001, Re.2005 and Beyond”
“Piero Prato – I Caccia Caproni Reggiane 1938–1945”
“Sergio Govi – Dal Re 2002 al Re 2005: Storia degli Aerei Reggiane, Gruppo Caproni”
Methanol-Wasser-50 (MW 50) was first tested by the German Luftwaffe on the DB605A-1 for aircrafts in 1943. The first engines equipped with the system were the DB 605 powered Messerschmitt Bf 109 variants, beginning in early 1944.
“Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-1 through K-4”
If you read the book “The Secret Horsepower Race by Calum E. Douglas”, you won’t find evidence of MW-50 technology being used before 1944 in the context of mass production. Instead, it had to be tested first, and those tests obviously occurred before 1944.
The point is that the Germans used MW-50 to improve the mm.495 prototype in order to determine whether the Re.2005 would perform as expected, because the DB 605A lacked sufficient engine power. There was never any claim that MW-50 needed to be mass-produced at that stage; in an experimental context, mass production made no sense. That only happened in 1944.
The only thing that is not clear is the top speed of 720kmh and it was claimed to be achieved at 7300m,
Here you can see the performance of the mm.494
Here the conditions of the DB605A for the test flight of the G55 and the re.2005 that couldn’t make use of the full power of its engine
Here the performance of the re.2005
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Note that the ingame Re.2005 VDM flight performance matches these tests of MM.494, despite specifically being MM.495, and the fact that Gaijin has stated multiple times that this plane performs better than the tech tree Re.2005 in every way, when they have actively modeled it with worse performance.
Very interesting. 
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That’s correct. Gaijin should classify it as the MM.494 and either remove the VDM or adjust the engine performance otherwise the name doesn’t match the real plane.
Something has to be done—otherwise it will be a useless vehicle, underperforming at BR 6.0.
And the worst thing you have to pay for this vehicle real money.
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It’s not even the engine, it’s just the propeller that’s horrible and has worse efficiency at all speeds, so it outputs consistently lower thrust.
That makes it even more stupid since the entire reason those tests of MM.494 ended up slower was because of a crappy engine, which this plane doesn’t have.
In short it’s modeled with the performance the MM.494 achieved despite it not being the MM.494 and not having the bad engine that the MM.494 had.
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To change the question, tecnically this plane can carry a bomb of 1000kg, isntit? So why they don’t havr added the 800kg?
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The Re.2005 MM.495VDM test flight that with the allegedly MW-50 equipped engine pre-dates the earliest documented Luftwaffe test flight of a DB.605+MW-50 equipped Bf.109 by around 5 months.
Germany’s BMW-lead study into the efficacy of utilizing and optimizing MW-50 injection comes out in June of 1943.
The Re.2005 was the test flown with an MW-50 equipped DB.605 less than a month after the results of the BMW study were published.
In order for this to happen it would mean that the Luftwaffe did not prioritize the development and improvement of their own existing fighters over the Italian ones. It would also mean that the DB.605 engine problems of 1942-1943 were already solved to a satisfactory level.
One of the sources I am using is The Secret Horsepower Race. I also can just ask him specifically in regards to this question. But the information I have gleaned makes it seem incredibly unlikely that the Re.2005 was tested with MW-50.
The only thing that you have cited is a bunch of secondary sources. There are no primary sources that indicated that the engine was equipped with MW-50. I would not be surprised to find out that this is a case of one author just referencing another authors work and taking the claims at face value.
The Germans had their own problems with the DB.605 and having to de-rate it for combat use throughout most of 1942 and into 1943. They had to make some design/production changes to the engine in order to get it to make the designed horsepower.
On top of that it doesn’t look like that the MW-50 equipped DB.605 flew in a 109 airframe until 3-5 months after the Re.2005. I just don’t find this sequence of events to be all that likely.
And then you have the claim of 720kph indicated air speed which is rather ridiculous. The only two ways for that to be realistically feasible is if they had an airspeed indicator that was especially calibrated for true airspeed at 7300m, that there was a translation error and they meant true airspeed instead, and also that the engine power was equivalent to that produced on the DB-605 ASM…so not only did the Italians get first priority on flight testing an MW-50 equipped engine…but they also beat the Luftwaffe to the punch on equipping the DB.605 with the larger DB.603 supercharger.
Or the Re.2005 has to have the most aerodynamically efficient wing with the lowest drag ratio of basically any plane during the war…including the P-51 Mustang. And they had it all in the middle of 1943.
If that was the case then the RLM would have been falling hand over fist to rush the plane into full-scale production and done everything they could to re-engineer the airframe for mass production.