Jafo

If I offended, I apologize.  I lump it in the same category as playing WW2 computer games as the Nazis and machinegunning down the hapless Yanks.  It's all in good fun.

Oh, i loved the P-38, it's looks alone are enough!!!

My favortite WWII planes, in no order..

Spitfire...(a bit of a cliche to say that these days, since everyone liked 'em, but w/e)
P-51
Lanc
P-40 (close to my fav)
Bristol Beaufighter

Edit - How could i forget the F4U!!! I have two of these, one resin the other a limited edition die cast one, that remains boxed!

P-38s are nice.

And gotta love the Sturmoviks

Spitfire MK IV or V, I forget which one, had a four bladed prop and wing mounted cannons. There was also one that had the wing tips squared off instead of rounded. Played havoc with the FW-190's. Then came the Tempest, bigger and heavier and the Typhoon, also another heavy. One thing that always got my curiosity going the Gloster Meteor. Twin engine jet yet, though it was a contemporary it, to my knowledge never saw combat. Always wondered how it would stack up against an ME-262.

Trivia: What propeller driven plane broke the sound barrier in late WWII.

Trivia #2: What propeller driven plane went through a brick wall and sustained very little damage.

Actually it was a P-47 that attained that speed in a dive and it was a P-47 that went through a brick wall.

I havent used a flight sim in a while. the last one i really got into was F-15 Strike Eagke II and that was a miroprose release on the Amiga! I prefer combat flight sims, but nothing ive looked at these days suits me, i'd want FSX but combat.

Are there many mods for FSX Jafo?

Then...by the time you get into skinning the planes....you can have even more fun..... there's me as the pilot...

On the P-47 again..

Pushed up to the sound barrier.  Not able to go through it.

The P-38 could get close enough in a full throttle, high altitude power dive to start to flutter, shudder and rip aeirolons off.

The one aircraft that did really seriously push the sound barrier was the Me-163 Komet.

Pilots were warned in training not to dive under engine power and even in glide had to brake in long dives.

German engineers couldn't get a handle on the fact that the stresses were from compression of the atmosphere at speed and never remedied it.

Yes--rocket powered but before jets were really perfected and combat operational.

The German engineers were baffled because they knew the engine could accelerate the aircraft faster but it began to fall apart as it accelerated past a certain point (and it was already a death trap).

Another thing they never quite figured out was that their gyroscopic gun sites were too slow to track as fast as the Komet could be brought about.

The survival rates of experienced pilots was so low and their combat deployments in the Komet so brief that no one could understand why the guns were so inaccurate until near the end of the war.

FYI Jafo--there's "Google Mars" too.

The Komet is the aircraft definitely known to have been pushing the sound barrier--by war's end, engineers were understanding more about compression and it's possible post WWII someone pushed close.  If you break the sound barrier though you know it.  There is a huge shake and a rush forward in speed--it would have been like nothing experienced before at that time.

The Me-262 got really nailed on landing and to a lesser extent the Komet did too.  The Allies knew very little about the Komet until after the war.  The largest number of Komet fatalities was from the droppable landing trolley bouncing back up and hitting the underside of the fuselage and detonating the explosive fuel mixture it used.  The other common cause was rough landings on the skid that caused the craft to bound and on dropping back, sloshing together unspent fuel elements--blowing up the craft yet another way.

The plane handled very well and was easy to fly but it was a monster on the details and took fast thinking and keen observation to avoid catastrophe and handle at full speed well enough to engage a target.

First I'm hearing of a plane going SOS that early in the war. The Germans had some pretty good equipment and in some respects were years ahead of the rest of the world. Good solid engineering but with the wrong people in charge. Had the upper echelons left things alone and not listened to their half crazed bosses the world might be a very different place. Werner Von Braun? (not sure if name is correct) might have stayed in Germany and Einstein might have stayed too instead of coming to the US in the early thirties.

Really need to brush up on my history. OMG!