Hey guys, just wondering how realistic the planes are? I see so many planes available, are they more study or more survey?

Somewhere in the middle I'd say.

You get a good sense of each aircraft's personality including specific strengths, weaknesses and quirks. Torque, trim, supercharger stages, prop pitch, and other factors that affect each aircraft's 'flyability' are modeled. And the sim's ballistic modeling was groundbreaking in its heyday so the gunnery is very challenging. Ordnance loadout options like bombs and rockets are very generous, and include factors like adjustable bomb fuze delay. Aircraft can overheat, especially those that have manually-controlled radiators.

On the other hand, systems modeling is largely generalized. For example, aircraft generally do not have selectable fuel tanks, which was long a criticism against the P-51. The P-47's turbocharger is automated instead of controlled by the pilot; etc.

I hope that helps.

They don't meet the charts everywhere to within 5% but are supposed to meet important points to within 5%. Considering that serial production planes varied by 5%, that's not bad.

So much for charts. The handling, the different effects like slip-roll coupling that comes out of the way they're modeled was well beyond what other flight combat sims offered from the start up to 2008 that I know of or heard of.

Even -that- got a number of improvements during development with 2 major overhauls occurring between 1.3 and 2.0 and then between 4.01 and 4.07. The latter was IMO largely due to a thread at UBI (and maybe other forums) about the stall-spin behavior where many IRL pilots noted that you could not stall without spinning and attributed it to 'auto-rudder'. It might have been, rudder use became more important with the more detailed 4.x FM transported from work on BoB (later named Cliffs of Dover). We didn't have such detail from the start at least partly because the average gaming PC in 2000 couldn't run that much detail.

So there you have charts vs realistic handling. With a table-driven or other end-point-driven deterministic model you can meet your charts everywhere "to within 1%" and have what handling falls out while with a true physics-based model you can get the handling and performance limits fall out where they will. Neither is perfect but the first way completely lacks many effects and poorly tacks on others in "canned code".

But -- due to tweaking plane parameters to meet chart point demands, IL-2 does make some sacrifices that have been and are noted often, even to the point of fixation by some players. Me, I don't care if a particular model climbs too well in a 500m altitude band but there's been entire forum campaigns launched over just that to push agendas far beyond the scope of the difference.

Also just to note: the physics based model of IL-2 does not cover every effect of real flight. The amazing thing is that it does cover as much as it does. Or at least that's what a number of RL aerobatics pilots and a few aero-engineers posted years ago.

It's the best you're gonna find...anywhere...IMHO.
The details, I have no idea.

Just my opinion, but the 'feel' is right. Every model may not be tweaked 'exactly' right, compared to the next, but they do their best. The 'feeling' of flight is the best I've ever tried, so I've invested my money, and time, in this particular SIM.
A lot of both, by the way.... .

Plane for plane, I like IL2 better than FSX.

Each sim has its place. when I was flying for real I would use Microspunge Flight Sim to fly the route I was going to take if I had never flown to a particular airport before. On the other hand if I wanted to blow something up Id plug in IL2 and go crazy

Regards

Mailman

Wow guys, thank you for such detail. You guys really went above and beyond and I appreciate it. Especially you, Neal.

Yeah, what Neal said. And without any bias I might add which is refreshing in IL-2 related subjects. The best thing about IL-2 is that it continues to grow and evolve with updates and add-ons from the mod community that there is now more than 300 flyables and over 1000 objects not to mention a built in Mission Editor. You just can't beat that with anything being made today for $10

IL2 is not a study sim.. and it's engine is over 10 years old.. having said that it is still pretty darned good. Neal summed it up pretty nicely.. but I will add that the beauty of this sim is that even though like some have said the FMS are not 100% spot on to specs but they are close enough .. and each one is individually unique enough to keep it enjoyable.

I would add that in real life under combat conditions your performance would vary quite a bit. Little things like how much you over compensated on the rudder or how hard you jerked the stick would be much more disruptive than a minor glitch in a computer program. How much fuel was used up to this point in the flight? How many holes have been patched up in the wing? How have they disrupted the airflow? How many rivets popped from that near miss by that 88 etc.?