Bf-109 K-4 Air Combat Performance

I'm certainly not an ace and since I don't have a TrackIR I'm seriously handicapped in a dogfight situation. However I observe what happens when AI flying Bf-109 meet P-51 and when FW-190 meet P-51.

Per my observations, the FW-190 and P-51 seem to be at similar performance levels, maybe with a slight edge for the P-51.

But when AI flying the Bf-109 encounter AI flying P-51 the Bf-109 seems significantly superior.

I have played the FW-190 mission "Furball" quite a few times and I had to modify it in order to give the Doras a chance to win. I even added two OSA SA-8 SAM's near the airfield. Now the Doras win more often than the Mustangs, but they still suffer heavy losses.

Now I have copied that modified mission for the Kurfürst (replacing all Doras with Kurfürsts). Even after making significant changes, reducing the Kurfürsts number by 3 and removing the SAM's, it's still a massacre with all the Mustangs splashed and the Kurfürsten having only light losses.

This makes me wonder whether the performance model of the Kurfürst is realistic. Or that of the AI pilots flying it.

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This makes me wonder whether the performance model of the Kurfürst is realistic. Or that of the AI pilots flying it.

This! The AI uses a completly different simple flight model (SFM) compared to our professional flight model (PFM). I can't say how realistic the AIs flight model is though. Just want to make clear that there is a difference between AI and player flight model.

The 109s slaughtering the Mustangs it's the normal evolution. The Bf-109K-4, right now, it's a BFM monster. I had no problem out-turn and out-climb an P-51, even with an external fuel tank, in Multiplayer.

It does make me wonder about the Fw190 FM it should also have the edge down low not the P-51!!!!

Up high is when the P-51 excels.

The 109s slaughtering the Mustangs it's the normal evolution. The Bf-109K-4, right now, it's a BFM monster. I had no problem out-turn and out-climb an P-51, even with an external fuel tank, in Multiplayer.

It seems to me it's more a matter of the AI Mustang pilots not being very good at exploiting the 109's weaknesses, nor of using the 51's strengths. All three of the WW2 AI seem to run the same "playbook" right now. They are "impatient", and tend to turn hard in to an opponent without ever extending to rebuild energy, they rarely split-S or use any downward energy-building maneuver, over-use zoom climbs and stall turns, and like rolling scissors.

All of these maneuvers favor the aircraft with greater power loading and superior low-speed handling, and are detrimental to the aircraft that performs best at high speed.

In PvP online, I have had absolutely no problem mangling 109s with the '51, generally taking between 1:1 and 3:1 ratios against them. I find them little more challenging than the '51 (though harder than the 190), but you *really* can't fight them the same way. If you fight a 109 like you would fight a 190, you will lose. You just have to keep your speed up and be patient. I love it when the 109s break hard into an attack to try to force a hard turning fight, because I just zoom climb out and look to re-enter the fight, now that they have burned all their energy off. It's hard to kill a 109 in a single pass, because the best method of attack against them is often a high-speed diving pass, usually at high deflection angles- because 109 pilots seem to jump straight to "haul back on the stick as hard as you can" when threatened, and kill their airspeed immediately (not without reason; the pilots are trying to play to their ride's best characteristics, and trying to sucker their opponent into burning off their energy, too). This, of course, means that flying with a wingman is very effective against 109s, because the type of fight the 109 is best suited for means that the pilots are often more inclined to fall for drag-n-bag tactics.

If you try to get into the slow, hard-turn fight in a '51 against a 109, you had better enter the fight in a position to take a killing shot immediately, because otherwise, the 109 will just keep pulling you around a tight turn until your engine overheats. You *can* hold a turn with a 109 at low speeds, if you use 10 degrees of elevator. Problem is that to keep up in the turn you have to max your throttle, and even with radiators full open, you can only last a minute or two before you overheat due to insufficient airflow at those speeds.

This makes me wonder whether the performance model of the Kurfürst is realistic.

It is literally a ton lighter and has more engine power, faster and has better vertical manouveribility than Mustang at all altitudes while mounting a 600 rpm granade launcher... thus equally skilled AI opponents who do not make accidental mistakes (like humans do) will just keep giving you the paper form.

It is literally a ton lighter and has more engine power, faster and has better vertical manouveribility than Mustang at all altitudes while mounting a 600 rpm granade launcher... thus equally skilled AI opponents who do not make accidental mistakes (like humans do) will just keep giving you the paper form.

It also has heavy control forces at high speeds, miserable situational awareness, and a gunsight/ nose design that makes deflection shooting nigh impossible. It also has ridiculously poor ballistics on the 30mm which makes it practically impossible to hit maneuvering targets (except AI, which aren't particularly good at guns defense; they offer nice smooth sweeping turns)

None of which affect the AI, but which do affect human players (and real pilots)

This is part of why I absolutely refuse to play on servers with labels on: it gives an unrealistically huge advantage to the 109 pilots who suddenly have one of their biggest deficiencies magically removed (since they can suddenly see through their obtrusive canopy frame and the back of the aircraft), while nullifying the advantage the Mustang has in superior SA, to include the tail warning radar. It makes a HUGE difference.

On a related note, though, it seems that the AI is a little less sniper-ific in the latest patches. They're still good, but they have much more believable margins of error in aiming. No longer do they always put the first round right through your windscreen.

I should had explained the simple killing machine the 109 K4 is. You don't need to be very cautious as flying the Mustang: just choose the moment to enter the fight and keep the energy, as also should be the main objective of the P-51 driver, all the rest will come smoothly IF the 109 keep a lag pursuit and enter the opponent turn at an ideal moment. Track the target for half a second with all blazing and its done. And for the P-51s, never enter a rolling scissors with a 109. The words again are control of the torque and lag pursuit.

I should had explained the simple killing machine the 109 K4 is. You don't need to be very cautious as flying the Mustang: just choose the moment to enter the fight and keep the energy, as also should be the main objective of the P-51 driver, all the rest will come smoothly IF the 109 keep a lag pursuit and enter the opponent turn at an ideal moment. Track the target for half a second with all blazing and its done. And for the P-51s, never enter a rolling scissors with a 109. The words again are control of the torque and lag pursuit.

You make it sound so simple, but the P-51 does have better maneuvering characteristics at high speeds. For the 109 to win, it really has to sucker the P-51 into burning off it's energy. At high altitudes, where the P-51 was best suited, the 109 *cannot* turn with a P-51, period. Up past 18,000 feet or so, the 109 loses too much of it's engine power.

You make it sound so simple, but the P-51 does have better maneuvering characteristics at high speeds.

True. That's why I use the words lag pursuit. All the rest it's patience. You can run but can't hide.

At high altitudes, where the P-51 was best suited, the 109 *cannot* turn with a P-51, period. Up past 18,000 feet or so, the 109 loses too much of it's engine power.

You might want to check the power curves of the 1650-7 and 605D... its true that the 109 looses a lot of power, but the 51 looses it even faster. The -7 was medium altitude engine, yet it did fine against the early 1944 109Gs (save for the /AS variants) that still had less power and had only medieum altitude supercharger.

But that is not what you are facing here. The 605D was no longer the medium altitude engine - it had a much larger supercharger from its big brother the DB 603 (think of a Merlin with a Griffon supercharger...), and thus it became a full fledged high altitude engine - with a nasty low altitude boost strapped on it (methanol system).

High speed can be a problem for the 109 and a (temporary) advantage for the 51, but the higher you go the less dense air you will find and essentially its always low speed (low ASI) knife fights there...

The Mustangs real advantage lay in better SA, longer ranged and easier to use guns, so basically - its more suited for team tactics.

True. That's why I use the words lag pursuit. All the rest it's patience. You can run but can't hide.

Really? I find it quite easy to hide behind one of the many oversized canopy bows the kurfurst has cluttering it's tiny cockpit ;)

Seriously, though, the kurfurst has the edge in low altitude 1v1, but above 18,000 feet or in a many vs many, the superior situational awareness, better gun sight, and flatter trajectory .50 cal bullets make it much easier to put bullets on baddies in the 51; at least in my opinion

You must add that the power curve of 605 engine is even and has no valleys between critical altitudes.

The only, but sometimes decisive, advance of P-51 is higher CL at moderate M numbers. But to use it practically P-51 must have the same quantity of fuel as 109 or even slightly less because of less powerful engine.

Yes IIRC the 3000-4000 m (?? from memory) altitude range is real "Death Valley" for the two staged Merlin/51D because the first supercharger speed is already making it loosing power, but the 2nd speed is still very inefficient (provides much more boost than needed and consumed lot of power unneccesarily). You loose several hundred possible horsepower because of that at those altitudes... compared

BTW even the usual two staged Merlin engine curves lie a bit since in practice, when installed on the actual aircraft the 2nd speed is engaged by an automatic gear change at given altidude, not neccesarily at the point where the two gears are "even" in power, so its not optimal as on the graps but kicks in a bit too early and so there is a sudden "sawtooth" drop in power due to that... But I suppose since DCS has all the systems modelled (separate supercharger stages, separate automatics to shift them) ;)

You must add that the power curve of 605 engine is even and has no valleys between critical altitudes.

The only, but sometimes decisive, advance of P-51 is higher CL at moderate M numbers. But to use it practically P-51 must have the same quantity of fuel as 109 or even slightly less because of less powerful engine.

And yet, at 23,000 feet, the v1650-7 and DB605D, from what I have seen, are both pushing right around 1300 hp. With the same output, but a cleaner airframe on the Mustang, that still puts the advantage to the Mustang up high. At 26,000 feet, the v 1650-7 is still pushing 1270. Maybe I should have said "over 20,000" instead of "over 18,000", but still, the higher you get, the closer their engines are performing.

I haven't seen many solid power curve charts for the DB 605D, though... I seem to recall you were searching for one not long ago, Yo-Yo. Ever find one, and could you please share it if so?

Bf-109 AI Performance vs. MIG-21 AI

I tried another scenario having AI pilots slugging it out: 4 MIG-21 vs. 4 Bf-109, the two groups meeting head-on.

1. MIG-21 with gun only

The 4 MIG-21 were slaughtered within less than 10 minutes with no Bf-109 lost.

The MIG's were outmanoeuvered all the time and had no chance at all. The small number of MG rounds in the MIG doesn't help of course

2. One of the MIG had 2 R-3S missiles

Two Bf-109 were downed by missiles. And all 4 MIG's were shot down with cannon and gun. The show took less than 10 minutes.

This performance of the AI with Bf-109 seems unrealistic to me. No problem for the guys who play on servers against humans with few AI aircrafts involved. But for guys like myself who fly mostly in single player, the overwhelming performance of the Bf-109 AI can be a problem if you have to fly against them. I'll make sure I'm on the right side!:joystick::joystick:

PS: If each of the 4 MIG's has 2 missiles the Bf-109's have no chance at all since they can't detect the missiles and don't try to outmanoeuvre them

Think the opposite. The performance isn't unrealistic, the AI logic is a simplified logic model. :)

If you have better sensors and higher thrust, do you still enter a turning fight with an more agile opponent?

Think the opposite. The performance isn't unrealistic, the AI logic is a simplified logic model. :)

If you have better sensors and higher thrust, do you still enter a turning fight with an more agile opponent?

Exactly. That's what I was getting at earlier: the AI logic is so stupid, they will try to use a high-speed aircraft as a low-speed turn fighter, and put themselves into really bad positions by doing so

On Kurfurst's site you can find manufacturer's power tables. They give critical points you can interlink with lines... it seems to me that I had some diagrams though... or it was only my imagination :) after these points. anfd calculated rate of climb figures that give some info how the power diagram must be plotted :)

Ok... just making sure you didn't have access to some that I haven't seen. I used the ones on the Kurfurst site and the WWiiaircraftperformance.com charts for the v 1650-3 and -7. From what I see, around 20,000 to 25,000 they're quite close in power output, with the v 1650-7 edging out the DB 605 as you get even higher. Considering the cleaner aerodynamics on the Mustang, it should be expected to build speed faster and loose it less quickly (barring accelerated stalls) at high altitude. Top speed at height seems to bear that out.

All considered, they seem quite close in performance up high, with level and diving performance going to the Mustang and climbing arguably going to the Kurfurst. Considering the wide turning circles up high, longer range shots would be more common than the super-short range shots you get down low (as the target cannot deny the long-range shot by sharply turning in the way they can in the denser air down low), so the weapons and sighting on the Mustang is also at a greater advantage up high.

Down low, I have found that the biggest difference between the two seems to be in cooling: I can run the Kurfurst all day at max MW50 and low speed, but the Mustang will toast its engine if you push it too long at low speeds. Luckily, 10 degrees flaps (well timed) will allow the Mustang to horse the nose around fast enough to get a killing burst in before the engine gets *too* hot. The only frustration I've had with the Kurfurst is that it can more easily disengage from the fight by climbing out... assuming it can pull away out of guns range quickly before starting to climb (which, luckily, many Kurfurst pilots online seem too impatient to do). Sure, the Kurfurst has more horsepower, but I've never actually seen that manifest in a dogfight as a noticeable advantage. I think the higher drag seems to more or less cancel it out.

Or maybe every single Messerschmidt pilot I've fought online was really sloppy. Who knows?

*edit: I should note that I make these comparisons at equal fuel weights... which is, of course, not equal fuel percentages; it is more like 80% fuel in the Kurfurst and 34% in the Mustang. Just because the Mustang can carry a zillion gallons doesn't mean it would have to if expected to perform the same short-range interceptor role as the Kurfurst. Obviously a Mustang at 80% internal capacity against a Kurfurst at 80% internal capacity isn't a fair fight. Speaking of interceptor Mustangs, it would be great if a -H Mustang was modeled at some point, as that is the technological and generally chronological contemporary of the Kurfurst, and would have been put in service had there been a perceived performance gap. As it was, there just wasn't a need for it; I suspect the allied pilots never even knew the Kurfurst had better on-paper performance, because by the time it came out, it was flown by rookies, fueled with fairly low-grade synthetic fuel, and suffering from inadequate spare parts and manufacturing capability (not to mention crushing numerical superiority of the allies), so the observed performance probably never quite lived up to the technical specifications.

It also has ridiculously poor ballistics on the 30mm which makes it practically impossible to hit maneuvering targets (except AI, which aren't particularly good at guns defense; they offer nice smooth sweeping turns)

It does have low velocity, but if you can't hit a maneuvering target with it, you should practice with it more. It is definitely doable.

Then again, most people think I'm weird because I won't pull the trigger unless I'm right on someone's ass, and you have to go out of your way to miss when you are 30 meters behind them, whether they maneuver or not.

As I asked Erich Brunotte was it very hard to turnfight with Spitfires and Mustangs in Dora he told that they never hesitated doing it and it was not a suicide... :)

Where did I ever say it was? In fact, that's kind of exactly what I'm getting at: the variations in performance on the fighters are so small that they can be easily nullified with good tactics. I feel the Dora is an inferior turnfighter to the Mustang, but I only know that because I've had a LOT of time to dogfight them in controlled, stress-free conditions. If it were a real war, and my contact with the type was a single encounter probably lasting under a minute, I doubt I'd even perceive there *was* a difference in performance between their aircraft and mine.

It does have low velocity, but if you can't hit a maneuvering target with it, you should practice with it more. It is definitely doable.

 

Then again, most people think I'm weird because I won't pull the trigger unless I'm right on someone's ass, and you have to go out of your way to miss when you are 30 meters behind them, whether they maneuver or not.

Exactly. You can hit a maneuvering target, but since the velocity is low (and as a result, time of flight of the projectile is so long), you have to be extremely close or any slight change of flight vector of the target will cause a miss. The battery of .50s on the Mustang fires a LOT more bullets per second, in a harmonized pattern, at a much higher velocity and therefore much lower time of flight at any given range. Estimation errors in lead, and unexpected target motion (jinking) are therefore lessened, and effective range (the range at which you can reasonably expect hits in a combat situation) is much greater.

I can hit maneuvering targets with the 30mm.... but I can hit them from three times as far away with the .50s.