I unfortunately have it on very good authority (that being a conversation with a Technical Moderator on Discord) that this bug report has been rejected.
Edit: I have just been told that technical moderators are not supposed to share such info. As such, I have removed/deleted the screenshot. I urge anyone that has saved the screenshot in some way to delete it as well.
I have many things to say about this plane and battlepass, specially since I haven’t been playing the game until recently so only now do I have enough activity to post.
Starting with my personal thoughts and opinions, I love the Re.2005 and it is one of my favorite WW2 fighter aircraft. I find it to say the least disappointing to see the MM.495 being added in what I can only say is the most boring way possible.
Now past the realm of my opinions… This Battle Pass announcement lies.
To quote the section about the Re.2005 VDM:
This variant features a new propeller and a slightly reshaped nose, improving all key performance characteristics.
As it stands right now this is blatantly untrue. This Re.2005 VDM performs worse in all key characteristics. I managed to get a hold of it and test drive it a day before the battlepass came out, and since the flight model has not been changed since then all these tests hold true. I tested top speed at sea level and at 7 km for both this Re.2005 VDM and the standard Re.2005, using MEC to force radiators at 0%, and the VDM was slower in both cases, doing 505 and 629 km/h while the standard Re.2005 did 516 and 651 km/h. Following this I did a basic climb rate test assuming all the other characteristics of the planes are the same. I simply put the planes in a 15 degree climb and checked what speed they achieved. Standard Re.2005 did somewhere around 330 km/h while the Re.2005 VDM did 315 km/h.
Overall this means that the plane simply has less thrust. That means that even turn rate is worse since you will be achieving sustained turn rate at a lower speed, therefore increasing turn time.
Edit: I have since gone and tested both the Re.2005 and Re.2005 VDM using the browser map to see their thrust output at different speeds with an altitude of 100 meters. I can therefore confirm that the Re.2005 VDM just achieved consistently lower thrust output than the standard Re.2005.
Thrust table
Rerunning the tests might not give you exactly the same kgf values, specially at lower speeds where fast acceleration means the exact speed won’t always be exactly what is on the table, but my results were this and I tried being as precise as possible.
I don’t know if this is a miscommunication between whomever wrote this announcement and the people that actually work on flight models, or if a straight up lie in order to boost up sales, but one thing is certain: Gaijin must address this, either correcting the announcement to say that the plane performs worse (not better), or buffing the performance of the Re.2005 VDM to whatever level they think is correct when they were making this announcement.
Onto bug reports, I have a lot to say here.
As far as I am aware, there is no primary documentation available on this specific plane, any and all information coming from secondary documents. If someone can prove me wrong I am more than willing to edit this part of my comment, but as it stands, to my knowledge Gaijin is using purely secondary sources to model this plane.
This is not a problem in of itself, and it’s not the first time either. The T20 medium tank is modeled entirely using information gathered from R.P. Hunnicutt’s book on the T20 series. Sometimes primary sources are simply too hard to access so secondary sources have to do.
The problem is that even when this is the case, two secondary sources or one primary source are needed for a bug report to even get forwarded to the devs. Even when the devs themselves rely on a single secondary source for modeling a specific vehicle, you have to actively provide more than what this multi million dollar company can gather in order to correct a certain characteristic.
I ran into this specific problem with none other than the T20 itself. I had to spend months, if not a year, looking for some other source other than Hunnicutt for my bug report on the T20’s transmission, because I knew for a fact that if I had made a bug report with just Hunnicutt as my source (even though Gaijin bases the T20 entirely off of Hunnicutt), it would be rejected. And I have no doubt in my mind that for this plane Gaijin has used the very book that is being used in the bug reports that advocate for the addition of MW-50, and simply chose to ignore that part of the source, and despite this they still reject those very same bug reports.
In short, the rule of “2 secondary sources or 1 primary source”, for vehicles like this which revolve almost entirely around secondary sources (sometimes even just a single secondary source), is stupid. There have to be exceptions when primary sources are simply non-existant or extremely difficult to get a hold on, because otherwise it just slows down the development of the game.
