I had heard that Lindbergh had advised the Army Air Corps how to greatly extend the range of the P-38 by pulling RPM back to 1400rpm and maintaining 30 inches of mercury. It was proven during the war to both extend range and not burn the engines out. I’m wondering if anyone has tested this on the Flyingiron P-38?
I don’t think the mixture is modeled that way.
Real-life, the mixture was automatically controlled in both Auto-Lean and Auto-Rich settings (Emergency Rich was just opening all the ports manually in case the pressure carb failed and you still needed to get fuel fed to the engine). As such, the P-38 didn’t have a fully manual mixture control-- the mixture lever was a four-position selector, not a 0-100 pull-lever like in a GA plane.
You can fly the Flying Iron P-38 pretty close to these numbers last I tested it, but I haven’t checked the range or fuel burn numbers to see what it ended up with. It goes quite slow at this setting so don’t plan to get anywhere fast!