Recent content by P1234567890

I got to see Marseille's real (and airworthy) plane today! That was totally cool; thanks pbfoot; you're awesome!

You're basically admitting that the only reason you voted for the guy is because his nationality is the same as yours. Although in fairness to you, if I were Polish, I would probably also be biased against the Luftwaffe. But in any case, I still have to say that I'm very surprised that...

I'm not sure you're reading my posts. I wrote this: The top-scoring RAF pilot of the Battle of Britain was Sgt J Frantisek#, 303 Sqn. He had 17 kills, which is certainly good, but it isn't even remotely close to what Galland and Moelders were pulling off.

Well, there were only two or three superstar fighter pilots on the German side. That's not enough to change the outcome of the battle.

Of course. Anyone who flies long enough gets shot down. Marseille was shot down. Rudel was shot down plenty of times. By the way, these are two more great categories: ratio of planes lost vs. planes shot down and ratio of planes lost vs. number of combat missions flown. But I think the...

I've explained this. You assign all possible weights to kills, and you do the same with every other category.

I've *explicitly* stated that it's not based on kills, and also explained *exactly* how it's not based on kills. It's based on as many things as possible. That's the whole point. But just for the sake of argument, let's say we rate pilots on number of combat missions flown. After all...

I don't know about this. If you shoot down a bunch of planes during your first two missions, then fine, maybe you're just lucky. But if you *consistently* shoot down enemy planes over literally hundreds of sorties, then there's something other than luck going on. At some point the law of...

If it's impossible when using a mathematical model, then it's also impossible when using your gut or any other model. The advantage of my proposal is that it factors in a lot of things which someone's gut instincts won't. I'm not saying you can. I'm not saying that my model is perfect, but...

I think that for some of these stats we have a chance of finding accurate records, and for others we don't.

You raise legitimate objections, but really we have to crawl before we can fly. If the information isn't there, then there's nothing we can do, regardless of whether or not we're using a fancy mathematical model. I'm not even sure we can find ammo usage statistics for most pilots. We have...

I can program it up; that's the easy part. The hard part would be to get all of the stats. If people here were willing to help me gather stats, then we could make the result arbitrarily good. The more info we find, the better it would be. We could just keep on improving it. The categories...

*NO* possible evaluation can be on target if any significant amount of information is missing. But the mathematical one which I am proposing gets around all of the objections of the form, "You're just considering the number of kills." I don't really understand what your objection is; this is a...

There are *tons* of things which I don't know, but it would have to be pretty miraculous secret knowledge in order to offset what we do know. Well, we can only go by what the records say. Unless there is a good reason to doubt certain stats, then we should tentatively accept them. Some...

It stands to reason that the people here who have thousands of posts are probably WWII aviation enthusiasts. Being an enthusiast about something tends to mean that the person is well-informed. And if you look at the people voting for Baer, they tend to be the ones who have thousands of posts...