How do developers know what flight charakteristics certain planes had? While some WWII veterans are still flying how do they know how a Defiant or Blenheim behaved in the air? Of course some pilots are still alive but their opinion of an aircraft has to be highly subjective. Parameters like speed and climb rate can be found in historical manuals, but how do the devs try to get a convincing feel of the individual birds, if you know what I mean?

i cant believe no one answered this obvious question yet..are you gusy trying to keep the door closed on this chap ?

It goes a little something like this flightstick..

Originally the developers used to read manuals, talk to pilots, scour books and even use pilots as alpha testers for their up and coming new flight sim.At this early stage everyone was pretty happy that we got to try and emulate what real pilots had acheived in whatever scenario they were offering us.Then the net developed further.

People started questioning why doesn't plane Y easily defeat plane X , when Erich Hartmann flew it he racked up 968 kills in a day..before breakfast, but i cant hit the side of a barn flipping door ! Plus it overheats after only 2 hours of boost at max revs with my radiators closed..something is clearly amiss. Of course all followed by factual graph charts and flight data or stories from the one true information deposit..the internetz.

The developers at first stuck to their methods and even posted on different forums to try and defend why they had done what they had and where they had got information from, some of it even from users in the community. It didnt matter if they could only get so close because it was ,after all, only a game , the users had read something somewhere that always contradicted what they had produced.

That was all a long time ago ... now they simply use a time machine and go back and fly the planes themselves.

Hey Ajay, is that Fritz in that time machine? Could put a whole new spin on Heinkills stories!

As for the original question I've often wondered that myself. Is the atmosphere itself modeled, and then each aircraft modelled to react in different ways according to a certain dataset. Or alternatively does each plane have its own independent flight model which simply relates to its altitude velocity and attitude?

lol..very well could be Bokonist..maybe it is even Heinkill himself