I just acquired the Kurfürst yesterday and decided to take it for a Spin this morning.
I have long been a fan of the F-4, and G-2 models of the 109 and consider them some of the finest fighter planes, but my previous experience with the K-models from IL-2 1946 did not made me a fan.
The 109K in DCS looks quite good. It almost look factory new. The landing gear lights looks to bright and to clean. I am used to WWII lightbulbs which looks a bit dim, like the flashlights of my childhood.
As this was my first flight all my axis had no curve and no dead zones.
The auto engine start sequence sucks in single player mode and I ended up twice with an aircraft that did not have the engine running. So, I ended up taking a take-off mission. The sound of the engine at idle sounds great. I throttled up slowly and with slight rudder correction the wings stayed level until the 109 got airborne. It jumped into the air like the Spit but that experience it was fairly easy to catch it before it stalled.
If you are too lazy to use rudders to keep the ball centred, the aircraft will roll to one of the sides. The aircraft have no rudder trim which makes it a pain. The aircraft seems unstable on the roll axis and require constant hold on the stick to one side. So, I you have a Warthog you should expect pain in your right wrist ???
I did a full flap landing from 400m in a Spitfire like landing. Unlike the Spit it does not loose speed as fast. The landing was very bouncy, but I ended out safely on the ground. Had it been a Spit the gear would have collapsed.
I am glad that this purchase was the last of current warbirds.
My impression of the Kurfürst is a match of the one I got of the one in IL-2 1946. The aircraft is all work and no joy. It is stiff on the controls, need constant attention to fly right, it only virtue is the ground, TO and landing characteristics.
According to the pilot stories I have read, the last version of the 109 lost all the fine flight characteristics of the original, so I guess that the DCS model reflects the real aircraft.
It’s meant to be an absolute pig…but it owns the P-51 in DCS. Only reason it’s competitive with the Spitfire is it’s higher speed.
I do enjoy the challenge of it though. I’m slightly surprised you found the landing gear stronger. It should be on a par at best, and weaker in most cases. It’s how they lost so many.
The 190D is the best WW2 fighter in DCS, for the time being.
The 109 in DCS is a pretty representative image of how it really was to fly a 109, according to what I know. I was very very pleased already when she was in the early beta test, even though nowadays it feels even better. Old friends of mine talked with some of the test pilots (Klaus Plasa and another dude) of the Bf109 G4 (rebuilt Buchon) ‘Red 7’ belonging to the Messerschmitt Stiffung and apparently the behaviours of the DCS simulation such as the control instability, trim setups for ideal performance, takeoff and landing characteristics are extremely similar, and most of the real pilot’s comments coincide. While the K was not the most manoeuvrable of the 109 I have always been surprised how well the 109’s fly on other sims, especially on stability and level flight. Constantly asking myself “where’s that slipstream? Where’s that serious takeoff torque? Where are those handling details Günther Rall describes so well (for early 109s too)?” And DCS delivers.
It was especially disappointing for me with the BoX portrayal of the Bf109, I was expecting something a bit less docile and with less positive stability especially on the yaw axis. As a quick example - when taking off, you need to hold the stick to the right (roll right) to balance the combination of all the takeoff inertial forces. It was so important back in the day, that in one of the books about the 109 that I bought at Sinsheim it even suggests that a prototype was built with the functionality to snap the stick to a predefined position tilted towards the right as a takeoff default, but it was discarded since it was a nuisance in so many other ways. Having said that, except in DCS you wont ever need to do this to get off the ground in a straight line.
Having said that, I think the 109 is extremely competitive with the current airplane set in DCS and the P51 and spitfire really have a hard time to make the cut unless they have an energy advantage at first and of course always provided that the 109 pilot does not commit to anything stupid. Or maybe I simply have not flown enough hours in DCS to experience the dogfight possibilities to a great extent. And just for the record, I cannot compare to the 190D since I don’t own it, so I don’t dare to make comments about that one.