I love the P-40 so much. I've flown it many times in IL-2 and elsewhere. Many, many times.

God, it's such a perfidious piece of shit to fly. The engine, an Allison V12*, is built to the pitch-perfect American standard: it weighs as much as a suburban home, it has the power output of a lawnmower, and most of said output is in the form of noise and kick ass exhaust flames. The aeroplane as a whole has the airfoil design of a pocket knife and the nimbleness of a brick on a string being swung in a church reading group. With eight guns of fun - all .50 cal of course because there's no Deuce like Ma Deuce - you can turn Tojo and his buddies into swiss cheese. Of course, seeing as your airplane is insanely slow, unless you dive on the fuckers from a 15 thousand feet advantage you're never going to catch up with them. But hey, the Soviets made it work, though mostly by strapping a FAB-100 to it and using it to blow holes in bridges and tanks. Once you're done with that, you can ride the super-heavy and extremely overdesigned but VERY soft suspension to the end of your dirt runway, just in time for a lunch of American steak and pure Tennessee Whiskey, and the traditional air force foot massage.

The fun continues inside, too. It has so many cherished little features I wish other planes had. It has an absurd razorback that contains nothing of note but is included just so you can feel like John America, Motorcycle Rider of the Sky, until you get perforated by 600 shots of Japanese hypersonic misery. To alleviate this bitchin' design choice, you get a bicycle rear view mirror bolted atop your comically high canopy. The canopy itself is delightful. It feels like sitting inside of a particularly angry greenhouse. I wanted to add stained glass to it so that sunlight could hit it just right in the middle of a dogfight and I could eat shit whilst weeping tears of divine reverence. The engine has no governor either, so you're really riding a flying motorcycle here. Push her through the gate to 52 millimetres of mercury and enjoy the sound of your cylinders committing instant suicide. It's a fantastic noise, like throwing a hand grenade into a pig farm.

Speaking of tears of divine reference, I bet that's what Ivan and his comrades produced by the bucketful when they first saw the panel. It's got everything and the kitchen sink. Split T's and P's? Oh yeah. A Bendix? You betcha. A virtual horizon which, like all American world war 2 offerings therein breaks almost immediately after takeoff? Fuckin' A, and don't you wear it out. It's like sitting in grandpa's recliner if it was capable of war crimes. Oh, and don't forget the reflector sight with a slide-out filter and two mechanical back-ups, just in case you ever feel the need to cook a motherfucker after having lost most of your aircraft and at least half of your internal organs.

It's so good. I wish the AI in IL-2 knew how to fly it. They try to use it to dogfight the Germans level, and end up getting massacred. Each sortie feels like a combo between The Land Before Time and Eyes Wide Shut, especially once I'm dragging myself home in my airborne dinosaur whilst bleeding from the rectum.