Dear friends,

We're glad to present you with another update of the sim - 5.204. It brings the new Collector Plane, the very late war Ta 152 H-1[il2sturmovik.com]. This unique machine was a pinnacle of German piston engine technology of its time, designed to be able to engage Allied bomber formations at very high altitudes and prevail over Mustangs and Spitfires. You could say it was over-engineered with its three-stage (!) supercharger and two simultaneous boost systems (MW-50 water-methanol for altitudes up to 10 km and GM-1 nitrous oxide for 11+ km). Yes, this is not a typo - this piston-engine aircraft could not only climb above the modern airliners (its ceiling was 13 km), but also be able to dogfight there.

Like most late-war German war machines, there were too few of them to make a difference. By the spring of 1945, when it was too late to intercept Allied bomber formations - Allied ground forces were advancing into the Reich from both the east and the west - only about two dozen aircraft were combat-ready. The few planes were used in the usual fighter roles and, ironically, much closer to the ground than they were built for - covering the takeoffs and landings of the new jet-powered aircraft (see below). This is similar to the story of the Allied P-47 Thunderbolts, which were designed for high-altitude combat and had special systems for it, but ended up spending a good part of their flying time close to the ground because they proved to be the best ground attack fighters of the US Air Army Air Forces. The Ta 152 Pilot's Career mode is only available on the Rhineland map (I./JG 11 since March 1st, 1945), but for player convenience, it is also available in the Scenario Quick Mission (AQM) mode on the Normandy map, and of course on every map in the game in simple Quick Missions.

There is a new mission type available for the late war German Career Mode - Jet Airfield Cover, where you should prevent the Allied fighters from shooting down jet aircraft near the airfields where they were stationed. New jet aircraft such as the Me 262 and the Arado 234 were hunted by the Allies when they were most vulnerable - during takeoff, when their speed was still low, or during landing, when their speed was already low. One such episode is shown in our promo video.

The Jet Airfield Cover mission type is available not only to Ta 152, but also the Fw 190 D-9 and several Bf 109 squadrons that were flying it historically.

Another important change is the increase of the maximum amount of buttons and axes on a controller from 64 to 128 - modern joystick and throttle combinations could exceed the old limit when connected to one another. This shouldn't be a problem anymore.

Last but not least - please check out the new section on our website, Museum[il2sturmovik.com]. We have been preparing it for some time, here you can find the historical information about the aircraft and ground vehicles modeled in our sim.

5.204 Change Log:

1. Ta 152 H-1 Collector Plane has been released;
   
2. Maximum number of active buttons increased from 64 to 128 buttons per device;
   
3. Rhineland Career: a new Jet Airfield Cover mission type is available for Fw 190 D-9, Ta 152 and some
4. Bf 109 squadrons (I./JG 27, III./JG 27, IV./JG 27, II./JG 54, I./JG 26, I./JG 27, I./JG 11, II./JG 26, III./JG 26);
   
5. Bf 109 E-7: Romanian Air Force color scheme added;
   
6. Fixed a problem with assigning a command to the 64th button of a controller. Please note that
7. previously added command assignments to this key will need to be reassigned;
   
8. Career and AQM: Fixed landing at High Halden airfield from east to west;
   
9. Career and AQM: fixed taxiing at Dortmund airfield;
   
10. Kuban Career: fixed action point generation at wrong coordinates (a corner of the map);
    
11. Stalingrad Career: removed missions of gunboat artillery spotting in winter;
    
12. Career: fixed a bug where cover fighters mentioned in the mission briefing failed to arrive;
    
13. Career: fixed a bug in Bomb Artillery Position missions when the attacking planes failed to drop the bombs;
    
14. Fixed a randomly occurring bug with technochat being disabled in multiplayer when one of the players logs out of the server;
    
15. Improved MK 108 cannon firing sound on external views.

Dear Friends,

Today we'd like to start this dev blog in an unusual way - with a retrospective. Over the years of work on IL-2 Great Battles we have created many aircraft, and for each of them we could write a whole article about how we searched for information, solved contradictions in documentation and drawings, built a visual model and designed a physical model and FM. But sometimes you can just show it - as they say, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

With studio-quality lighting, rather than a real-time renderer, you can really see how much work and love went into recreating each of our aircraft. The Hawker Hurricane Mk.II, a collector's aircraft we built three and a half years ago, is still a model of excellence in both visual modeling and physical model perfection.

As for the latest news, the new update 5.204 will be released soon, in two weeks; its testing is almost finished. It will include the new Ta 152 H-1 Collector Plane from the end of the war, which we described in detail in Dev Blog #358, as well as a number of important improvements and changes.

Modern controllers have many buttons and encoders, and their total number may exceed the limit of 64 buttons or axes if multiple devices are connected at the same time. Therefore, to support such configurations, the maximum number of buttons supported by the game will be increased to 128.

Several bugs in the career mode will also be fixed, such as friendly aircraft attacking the player group, and a new type of combat sortie will be added for the Luftwaffe on the Western Front - covering the takeoff and landing of the jet aircraft. Since Allied piston fighters usually could not catch up with them in the air, they used the tactic of shooting them down on takeoff when they had not yet gained much speed, or on landing when they had already dropped it. To protect the jet-powered Me 262s and Ar 234s from such attacks, they were covered near the airfield by German piston fighters, including Ta 152s.