External Stores and Ordnance

Firepower aircraft use external drop tanks, rocket tubes, bombs, and other stores, which have been modified to model drag.  The top speed of these aircraft while carrying external stores will be noticeably lower.  The more items the aircraft carries, the more the performance will be impacted.  The Firepower add-on package also modifies the stock weapons to create the same drag levels, so the stock aircraft will be equally affected. During our research, we found some interesting facts when it comes to drag. Check out these actual figures German engineers extracted from flight-testing a Me262 jet:

Me262 A-1a Jabo

Bomb load Loss of speed test

Load % loss of speed

1 SC250 bomb 3.6% loss

2 SC250 bomb 7.3% loss

1 SC500 bomb 4.6% loss

You will notice that, carrying fewer large bombs will result in far less drag than carrying twice as many smaller bombs. Know this when you pick your ordinance for any CFS3 plane after FirePower has been installed, because we modeled the drag figures based on real tests above and calibrated them to the in-game performance.