IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Bodenplatte -Republic P-47 Thunderbolt's .50 Cal Bonanza

Yeah, the early release of the P-47D triggered my purchase of yet another early access DLC. Oh, boy.

The mere mention of multiple .50 cals mounted (6 in these flights), was enough to pay the admission price for this strafing fanboy.



And, for your information, the P47D was a legendary ground attack aircraft.

The amount of gauges, is inversely proportional to the difficulty of flying the Thunderbolt. Seriously, even when I fly with complex engine management, the airframe and engine is very forgiving.

Strafing German halftracks. From a shallow dive, at an airspeed of ~ 275 MPH, the P47D is a pretty stable gun platform.

We are going to have a couple of posts regarding proper strafing technique (dos and dont's), but I want to mention in this post that I was pleasantly surprised by the flight model. See below.

Dive at boresight speed, check. Gun switch on, check. Mere touch of trigger, short burst 5 or 6 rounds, check. Return to the plane and forget shooting, recover at no less than 75 feet. Well, not that sure about this one.

I'm going to kill myself one of this days.

Why my recover was at such a low altitude?
"Mushing", a thing for which the P47 was infamous. You pull the yoke back and the aircraft doesn't respond instantly. I felt it and then I saw it in the TacView file.

The TacView of the same attack shown in the screenshots above. Note the sudden increase in the angle of attack (blue line in graph) and the trailing of the vertical speed (red line in graph).

Once more, flight models in IL-2 Sturmovik appear to be pretty close to reality.

Cheers,