A big Thank you!

They expect you to fly the plane back home.
Unreasonable, but you know how it is with
red tape.

All right folks. The FULL version is updated in the first post. It has hyperlinks in the Content Tables to help you find what you need quickly.

But the "flying back home" aspect has been already accounted for in the 200 km figure (Calais to Hawkinge and back plus fuel reserve) and even if it wasn't, doubling max range in the formula doesn't seem to make sense.

Edit: I've just completed a test flight as in He-111 guide, with an estimated 5% fuel load. Climbing straight from Calais with 1.15 ATA and 2300 RPM, I didn't even wait to reach 6000 m, but headed Hawkinge right away not to waste any fuel. Reached the target at about 3000 m, turned around and needless to say - promptly ran dry . Almost made it back gliding on these massive wings. If I took suggested 10% fuel I would have done it, but not because of reserve to be "very conservative", but because In my opinion that's the base figure we should start from.

The way I was estimating fuel requirements on flight mechanics lessons at the Uni. was based on dividing planned fligh into segments, calculating post-segment-weight / pre-segment-weight ratios from Breguet equations and multiplying these in the end. I know we don't have to be so anal about it in our flight simming hobby and some more simple formula should be enough, but I'd say Chuck's formula aint quite workin' . Still love the rest of these guides though!

Ok, I will explain my reasoning.

The fuel loadout we can choose is a percentage. Therefore the value we want to obtain is a percentage of fuel, which is equivalent to a ratio of quantity of fuel we take on total fuel capacity.

Therefore I simply use a rule of three by assuming that the fuel ratio is proportional to the ratio of distance we need to travel on total distance the aircraft is capable of travelling.

Fuel taken / Fuel capacity = Value in % = Mission Distance / Max Distance the aircraft can travel @ Max Takeoff Weight

One thing people often forget when using this method is that the range of an aircraft is the maximal distance it can reach before having to return to base. A range is half the distance an aircraft will travel in total. In order to get the actual distance, we need to multiply the range by 2 (since the aircraft goes to target and comes back).

This is why the "Max Distance the Aircraft can Travel" term of the equation is equal to the max range @ MTOW multiplied by 2.

It's all about the interpretation of a term "range" then. I kind of agree with the rest of Your post. However, something's off in the He-111 data You've got then, because -> see the edit of my post above .

Well, what I had at hand was a max range value. However, these range values vary from source to source, and they never specify at which loadout they use it. Some He-111 variants have a difference of several kilometers. They also rarely specify which variant of the He-111 is used, which is a major problem since configurations had important variations in terms of fuel tank configurations. The numbers I have are rough approximations, and I can't blame you for not being satisfied with their accuracy.

I know it is not the smartest way to do it (and not the most exhaustive, I know exactly about the method you use by dividing flight segments just like real airliner pilots do, I learned it in school as well) but let's just say that I can't seriously expect people to hop on multiplayer and plan their flight to this level of detail.

One smarter way to do it would be to extrapolate a max range using a fuel consumption (@ max climb engine settings for instance) in liters/hour and to divide it by the fuel capacity of the aircraft in order to gain a max flight time on a given engine setting. With this max flight time, you simply multiply it by a speed you intend to maintain and you get a new "max range" based on fuel consumption and airspeed.

This is the method I used for the Blenheim (you can look it up in the Bombing tutorial section of the guide) since by pure luck I was able to have these fuel consumption values at hand... and it works pretty well.

If you feel like it, based on your tests you could help me gain fuel consumption values (in liters per hour) at max climb rate engine settings and I could re-write these "fuel loadout" sections for the He-111, Ju-88 and BR.20.

Rgr that. Might do it in the close future. Right now, however, I'm going to spend a few days on DIRT Rally (vintage sport cars are my second "fix" after vintage combat planes). Damn, so many simulations, so little time !

Ok, great. Thanks, Art-J! I appreciate your help.

I did the fuel consumption tests myself and I re-wrote the fuel loadout procedure. It is closer to what you'd expect and has a certain level of conservatism that I deem acceptable.

Also corrected a couple of typos, format glitches, oh and I added some explanation on the crossfeed valve for the Blennie... stuff like that.

Sorry to derail the thread but... since I reinstalled my PC on the new SSD I can't find info on how to apply TF patch on CloD. Any pointers?

Go here to get them:
http://theairtacticalassaultgroup.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13010

Thanks a bunch!

You're welcome.