A Proud moment (Post 4)

     After flying a few hours of flying, I'm confident enough to say that I can can earn kills at a consistent rate... About 1 kill for every 4 or 5 sorties. However, that's up from 0, so it's certainly improvement. And they're pretty kills, too. Check out this one:

Aww yis. Pretty kills are pretty.
...Alright so it's not very pretty, but it got the job done.

      What we have here is the Japanese A6M2 'Zero,' pitted against the American F4F 'Wildcat.' Some important information for what I'm about to go through:

F4F-4 Wildcat:
Top Speed: 533 km/h (331mph)
Armament: 6x .50 Cal. (Browning Mk. 2)
Weight (Empty): 2674 kg (5895 lbs)
Wing Loading: 149.77 kg/m² (30.7 lb/ft² )

A6M2:
Top Speed: 533 km/h (331mph)
Armament: 2x. 7.7mm (Type 97), 2x 20mm (Type 99-1)
Weight (Empty): 1680 kg (3704 lbs)
Wing Loading: 107.4 kg/m² (22.0 lb/ft²)

(Wing loading determines how maneuverable an aircraft is, and is found by dividing the loaded weight of an aircraft by the wind's surface area. Therefore, the lighter your aircraft is and the bigger your wings are, the more maneuverable the aircraft is. However, this comes at a cost of speed.)

The Wildcat seems worse on paper, but it isn't. While they have the same top speed, you have to keep in mind that it's much heavier, so it takes longer for it to slow down after gaining speed. It's also more armored. You can see this in the video when I hit it and it starts smoking. If it was a Zero, it would've been obliterated.

However, the Wildcat was still inferior to the Zero, and you can see me exploiting its weaknesses in the video. For example, the same weight that gives the Wildcat an extra bit of speed works against it in this dogfight. We started at the same speed, so after we make our head-on pass and I turn around, he'll take a while to get back up to speed, while I can accelerate to top speed much faster. On top of that, he most likely had his engine taken out after taking rounds to it.

On top of that, the Zero is much more maneuverable, so I can easily keep up with any and all evasive maneuvers he tries to pull. The final thing that seals his fate is the armament differences. The Wildcat has more guns, they're all fairly small, designed for ripping apart aircraft with longer bursts. Meanwhile, the Zero has two small guns, and two large guns. The larger guns have a small amount of explosives in them, meaning that any hit on an enemy aircraft does serious damage- so smaller bursts do more damage. (At the cost of a lower fire rate, and lower ammunition count)

It was certainly difficult, but it's not impossible to become good at flying!



Now, I've also worked on ground attacking. It's not nearly as difficult, but it's still incredibly fun. Here's a video of an attack that went slightly worse than it could've.



I've talked about the IL-2's durability in previous videos, so I won't go over it again. Either way, you can see the simplicity of going on a ground attack mission vs. air combat.

Well, that's all I have for you today. Thanks for reading! If you've any ideas for a custom battle of sorts, I'll give them a shot, IL-2 1946 has an in-game mission editor, and it's pretty powerful. I've had some fun messing with that already. :-D

C'ya in the skies!

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Comments:
Josh C.: Improv
Eric L.: Whittling
Abby B.: Hurdling