WarThunder - BR6 - 109 Performance - Help Me?

I've got to preface this post with, I do not want this to be the usual "Russian Bias" rant at WarThunder, because in this case I've taken a look and I don't think it's Russian Bias which is my problem, it's lack of skill on my part... Let me explain.

I spent a fair amount of time last week playing WarThunder, playing Realistic Air Battles flying out the early tree 109's.  I flew the E-3, F2, F4 and G2 variants.  I got kills, lots of kills, I felt no frustration and I aced the G2-Trop for my trouble and unlocked the G13 and got well into 66% of unlocking the K4 variant.

Good progress for me, saying I can't play very often...

So, this week, I wanted to make progress on the 109 tree above the G2, specifically the G10 and G13, and unlock the K4.

Frustrated, wouldn't cover my feelings, first of all the default ammunition seems to make no impact on targets, I raked a P51D's belly with the dual 13mm MG and cannon of the G13, only to have it register 2 hits, I've sprayed seconds of fire at captured 190's only to see them sparkle, take no damage and turn away.  I've had to really calm myself down about not having the decent, or any, ammo belts unlocked for these planes and soothed myself with thoughts of "it will be better soon".

Unfortunately for me "soon" never came, I've been grinding all week, and all week I've had the use of the 109 thrown in my face, on one notable occasion I became the focus of every eye on my team - as they'd all been shot down - and I was back at 5K altitude (having already landed a crippled crate to repair and rejoin the fight), and all I got was abuse of a team member, whom was only a level 6 on his player card but of course knew all the tricks in the book, despite his having been shot down and my now dogfighting, not one, but four opponents at high altitude.  Of course I lost that dogfight, I did set an La-5 on fire, but he didn't go down, no of course he didn't... Meanwhile I've been burned, exploded, wings ripped off, pilot shot by a single clicking round from a B17 (yes through 83.9mm of armoured cockpit glass my pilot was sniped by a single round from a B17 gunner at over 400meters distance, didn't know a .50 cal had that penetration... oh, oh it doesn't, so my pilot must have had a heart attack that game!)

It's been dismal, and demoralising, and so I've just played another game... in the G10, I climbed high, the highest in my team, at 6K I leveled out and took a look around, there's 4 friendlies to my west, 2 to my east, east looks bad it's a Do17 and a 109 in a snarl up around 4K alt with a pair of Russian fighters (an La-5 and a Lagg3), I turn to dive to help just as both friendlies burn... Too late, too late, damn me.

The fight to the west is going on, badly for my team, but I see a 190 flying alone towards the western fight, he's right below me, he's moving, suddenly I see black smoke, he was on the tail of a friendly!... Damn it, Damn it!... But at least the friendly calls out his alt... 2.5K...

I drop my throttle, align my wings with his flight path and roll over and dive, I'm coming down on his six and he's not moving, not turning... he's not seen me!!!!

I come into firing range, and I put the pipper a head of him, and let my guns fire... the white and green streaks along his top side, I hear the squelching sound made by squib hits, I get one hit registered, two hits registered... and I flash past him and pull up to take my energy back into altitude.

Two hits, from a good 2 second burst... None of them made a difference, as I look over my wing, he's turned left and dived for the ground.

Unfortunately, I've been spotted, or he's called for help, so I see one of the La-5's to the west turn right, break from the swirling dogfight and start to come towards me... I'm zoom climbing up, 4000, 5000...5250.... before my speed is drained and I level off to make speed....

The La-5 was at around 2K altitude, some 8.4km away... Not only has he covered that distance, but he's climbed to 5000 meters and is going considerably faster to still be closing the distance with me...

HOW THE HELL DID HE DO THAT!  This is the core of my rant, I don't know how he did this, I don't want to believe Gaijin have programmed in some feature of the Russian planes I don't know about, or if you play from a Russian IP you get some benefits (the guy was speaking Russian in chat, I'm not just making this up).

His La-5, which has it came close was the Fn model, from a turning fight around 200km/h, had covered 7km of space and climbed 3000 meters in a mere minute.  UFO like performance!

But, I can see him coming, I'm now flat level, WEP on and gaining speed.... 350km/h.... He's still gaining on the distance to me... 1.4km.... 375km/h... He's still climbing, still gaining on the distinace to me 1.2km.... 390km/h.... He's not climbing, but he is still gaining on me... 0.8km... He's clearly levelled off, ready to start shooting, he wants speed now to close the gap...

I decided my only chance, is to turn on him, so split-S, inverting and pulling through, accelerating into wep at a point just below his aircraft towards me, as he starts to fire (I see his tracers) I return a burst of fire then his my rudder to skid past his shots... We flast past one another, I'm going 550+km/h back towards him... And I keep going straight, I'm soon at 4,500m altitude, 700km/h.... He is turning, horizontally!... The slowest kind of turn.... Yes I think, I'm going to escape this guy, or at least he's going to bleed energy now... surely!

Is he heck has like loosing energy, he's back on my tail now, we're going in the opposite direction, I'm at speed level, he's speeding up and already back behind me, I roll some, he's rolling with me, I don't want to loose my energy...

TRACERS!

Red tracers, flashing past my cock-pit from below, it's another Russian coming up at me, in a steep climb, he's below but coming fast, as I pass over the top of him he misses me, and I push the nose down to speed up more, I'm heading for base.

I'm down to around 2.5K alt now, and the IAS is red with warning, the enemies are not following me into this dive, I've got the speed, I level out... 750Km/h indicated, I'm sure I'll rip my wings off... WEP, vibration, altitude gone... Persuers... 

Well, they just gently now follow me in the dive, they catch me, at the bottom of my level out they're already on me, as if for every ounce of effort  I have, they have 1/3 extra...

I admit this plane is not unlocked, it's fully stock, but I'm struggling, utterly and totally struggling... I don't think I've played this wrong, I came from height, attacked an enemy, no dice, I climbed back to altitude... They followed, with ease.

All the rest of my team are down, I'm it... I'm low and fast, they are diving on me, can I take at least one with me, make this worth my effort?

I pull up, trying to take them with me, trying to lure them into a rope-a-dope, they've been blazing away with their limited ammunition, I have plenty... I go up, up... and up... 3000, 4000, 5000... They're behind me, the lagg however, is right on top of me... I'm at 200km/h... I kick the rudder over and wing over at the same time to cut the corner.... and WHAM

The 20mm shells from the La-5 cut my right wing off.

Never mind, it was a good fight, right?... I flew okay, they flew well, it was just numbers, there were two on me, two more on the way, right...

Yeah, but that 190... I had him dead to rights, he should have had more than two measly hits, he should have died... My shooting is bad?...

I go back to an unlocked plane, using an air target belt, the 109-E3.... Two planes shot down, one assist.... No my shooting is okay, I'm not going mad.  And yes I understand the slower flight path of the wing mounted 20mm from the E3 compared to the later G's prop mounted cannon.

So, I have to unlock those better belts on this plane, right, I need to find some way to get targets to earn vehicle research points... The Grind...

But what about those opponents, that seeming 1/3 advantage in acceleration, climbing?... Well the climbing we can see in the aircraft stat cards, the la-5 lists 22m/s climb speed, whilst my 109 lists only 13... That could explain some of the disparity... So, lets take an La-5 out, fly it straight and level - a better position than the one which caught me was in.

So, straight and level, radiator closed, fast fast... and climb....

I want it to climb 4000 meters before loosing energy...

I'm at 500 meters, so my target height is 4500... Lets see what happened at the top of my climb, and where that topping out was...

3900 meters... It topped out, at 3.9K... Nowhere near the wanted height, no-where near where the la-5 just caught me, nowhere near as good performance...

So HOW DID THEY CATCH ME, how do these Russian flying players always (and I mean always) get the advantage, even if below me and slower than me?

Energy Fighting & Windows Vista

This weekend, aside from having the car up on the ramps to fix a blowing exhaust, and generally running around looking after all our pets (oh and waiting an age for an Asda Groceries delivery)... I've been working on my Energy Fighting techniques in WarThunder.

My reason, I love the German fighter line, considering myself a specialist in the 109, and with the new spotting system I wanted to jump into simulated battle and see where my 109's took me... Unfortunately the one evening I got chance to set up Track IR and everything (after my windows 7 re-install) I found the Simulated Battle queue was only for Japan versus Soviet aircraft.

I languished about playing some US airforces in Arcade; something I've been doing all week, to learn about the new P38's and the new (to me) Apache and the early cannon armed P51 in the tech tree, bored however I set about Realistic Battle.

My record here has been dismal, as I treat it like a glorified Arcade, and I've found it easier to get vehicle research points by killing ground units, you'll see this in my player card as my stuka has something like 150+ ground kills in realistic and a thunderbolt has as many in the US tree for me.

But, I wanted to get practice in energy fighting, I've always found this awkward, I much prefer in my nature to turn fight.  Hence my early liking of British and Japanese airframes.  But Germany seems to be where my aesthetic eye has settled.

So, flying out my 109G/2 Tropical, I wanted to ace this aircraft and then work on unlocking the K4 variant, the final 109, which I've yet to unlock.

Two flyouts later, and I had little to show for myself, except the above very damaged but successful landing after tangling with an F4U and his raking me with fire.

Then something clicked, not only did I start to do the usual climb, but I started to get the feel for how to enter the energy fights, I started - amazingly enough - to get kills, and soon it all sort of clicked into place.

I was pulling dive & climbs slashing attacks at fighters, I was getting deflection shots into bombers, I was rope-a-doping P47's into trying to prop hang against my lighter airframe, and it was all a massive kill fest, I have had more successful flyouts, with more realistic air kills in the last few days than in the whole previous month, just though this ethereal something "clicking" into step.

My only negative would have to once again be the Yak-9's habit of putting fires out, in one example, which I hope to bring to you as a new video for my channel, I set a Yak-9 alight early in a battle, but then had to break off to deal with another Russian pilot, the second dealt with I only found the Yak had, not only put out a raging fire, but had managed to land and repair.

He returned to the fight, to make it a 1v1 duel, he versus I.  I energy fought to the better here, but still had to enter head-ons with him to defeat him in the end... All because those pesky pixies that put pouring flames out for pilots of Yaks.

Sign up to WarThunder with this link, and earn rewards based on my being a player, and reward me with gifts from the game as you level up!... Don't forget to come say "hi".

The other thing I did this weekend, was update the drive in the wife's Dell 6400 laptop, I put her a faster 40GB drive in there, and reinstalled Vista... yes Windows Vista.

Worked a treat, installing both service packs vastly sped up the time to live on the updates out of the box, which annoyingly the Windows Update service does not do, it insists on installing singular updates one by one, rather than jumping to Service pack 1, then jumping to Service pack 2 and then continuing, no it just goes through them as they were published...

But, reinstalled, and chrome installed, the desktop tidied and the right apps pinned to her start bar, lets home the machine now works right, it's mail problem had been a mysterious hardware pausing.  The whole machine would lock up, before coming back to life, however, I got to the bottom of this maybe by discovering nearly every screw in the chassis needed tightening.

British Gas: My Final Verdict

I'm utterly disgusted today... I've had contact from a Debt collecting Agency... They started to ask me lots of questions to prove who I was... But, I don't know who they are... They called me randomly, so I refused to talk to them.  This is what you always do, never fall for social engineering bullshit, always if you get someone claiming to be from a company and they ask you to prove who you are, don't believe them, they called you, you don't know who they are.

Ask them for a number to call their company back, check the number is a real number for that company via the internet, if you can, and then call them back and only then go through security with them.

Anyway, who were these people, no idea... No clues, not nothing...

So I opened my personal mail, I got three e-mails from British Gas....

Yes, British Gas, the energy rob dogs who I stopped having supply me over three months ago... We're in July, I swapped to Coop in April.... That's May June and now July... Why are British Gas chasing around after me?...

I had in May and June, checked my online account status and it said £0.00 balance, I owed nothing... Two months after my final reading to them, nothing owed, so I've ignored their e-mails...

The e-mail today... You owe us £147... WHAT!?!?!?!?

Yes, because it was my final reading they took three months to bill me... This is on top of my paying up all outstanding bills, this is on top of my phoning them and asking "Do I owe anything, I'm leaving your supply".. and being told "You owe nothing" and "there is nothing outstanding".

Here I am, July, more than three months after the fact, coughing up £147 because their billing system is so archaic and their processes to dinosaur slow that they could not and did not bill be before today!

My advice, stop using British Gas, they're utterly and totally unable to bill in any timely fashion, their bills are never accurate, their staff try their best to work around their systems, but they're so broken as to be a joke.

British Gas - Billing & Indian Bullshit

You may recall I mentioned problems with cold calls from British Gas in August?

Well, they're up to the same tricks, local Nottingham number, so I answer, loads of clicks and then a very noisy call centre in the background and an Indian woman shouting at me, insulting me, calling me a fool.

I'm not going to go through security with you, you called me, what you're effectively asking me to do is tell a stranger who just called me out of the blue on an unknown number my private personal information....

When I challenger her on this, and asked for a call back number, she even avoided the question and told me "we have very many numbers"... Yeah, well give me one!

Needless to say I went back to them myself and sorted my account, but I also reported to complain about this woman, she was so annoying, obtuse, rude and insulting... I posted my report at about 5pm yesterday (22nd December 2014)...

You want to see their reply...?

So, there's my mail into them, and I just got a reply... 12:21... Right... Here's the reply content...

Yes, the reply is blank, it's just a copy of my mail to them... Classic British Gas... Classic, fantastic Customer Service, fantastic... And British... Should be fucking "Indian Gas", so tired of this crap with them.