Hello all,
After taking delivery of the latest edition of the rules in the form of the WGS Rules and Accessories Pack I took the opportunity to bring togther about three years worth of tinkering with the formula for identifying WGS maximum altitudes and climb rates. I have used reference books from my own library and online resources to identify ‘real world’ recorded climb rates and operational ceilings for all the official WGS aircraft makes and models. In all cases I have gone to more than one source to identify the recorded statistics that are most likely to be correct.
Some of the references I used include:
Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of WW2
Hitler’s Luftwaffe (Woods/Gunston)
Concise Guide to Axis Aircraft of WW2 (Mondey)
Aircraft of the Aces (Osprey)
http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/
http://www.catalystwwiifacts.com/
http://acepilots.com/
http://www.ww2aircraft.net/
http://ww2total.com/WW2/
http://www.j-aircraft.com/
http://www.jplanes.com/
http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/
http://www.warbirdsforum.com/
http://www.airpages.ru/eng/ru/i16_5.shtml
I then compared these statistics to the ‘official’ WGS statistics for these same aircraft. After spending many hours crunching the WGS climb rate and altitude numbers, to say the results have many inconsistencies is an understatement.
MAXIMUM ALTITUDES
This was the easy part. After examination of the official WGS aircraft I found the following formula to be generally true:
('Real world' operational ceiling in metres rounded up to next 1000 divided by 1000) + 1 = Maximum Altitude
The additional +1 has only been included since the lowest altitude band changed from '0' to '1'.
For example: The Supermarine Seafire Mk.IIC has a 'real world' ceiling of 11700 metres. The formula is therefore 11700 rounded to 12000/1000 = 12 +1 = 13
Out of the 43 official WGS aircraft types only 12 are not consistent with this formula. Many of these inconsistencies can be simply explained by the use of slightly different ceiling limits published in different resources, or the use of statistics for versions using different power plants, etc.
I have tabluated the official WGS 'maximum altitudes', real world ceilings (in metres), and the 'consistent' maximum altitudes. Yellow indicates the altitude is one too high, and green that it is one too low:
Posted for information and comments.
Again I will make the disclaimer that I have made efforts to ensure the 'real world' recorded statistics are the most accurate I could locate in the literature available to me, however there will be conflicting data that may or may not be more accurate.
I will also post the results of my climb rate enquiries on this thread tomorrow.
Cheers,
Carl.
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