Japanese typically tested their warplanes "top" speed at 100 % throttle, not war emergency power (like everyone else did).
This often overlooked fact causes widespread misconception about Japanese planes top speeds. Hayate, for example, achieved 620 kph with 100 % throttle and 680 kph with WEP.
The famous 594 kph value for the N1K initially came from Francillon's excellent "Japanese aircraft of WW2" and it simply got copy pasted a gazzillion times around the net, but it's still without WEP!
TAIC report, for example, lists N1K1-J top speed with WEP as 408 mph (=660 kph!!) at 20.000 ft!
It does make sense when you consider that the Nakajima Homare engines made around 2000 hp. I always thought the Japanese aircraft in IL-2 seemed a bit too slow compared to the specifications of the real aircraft.
It certainly seems like the flight models of Japanese aircraft in IL-2 don't take the Japanese convention of using 100% power to measure top speed vs WEP (like everyone else did) into account.
Also, US test pilots often didn't know how to extract the maximum performance out of captured Japanese aircraft because they didn't know how to use the Japanese superchargers to their full potential. This was confirmed by US pilots that met Japanese aircraft in combat, stating that they were faster in combat than US tests suggested.
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Topic: N1K2-J Shiden-KAI (Read 8924 times)
