Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-199.189.108.73-20170306214252

I don't know if this has been asked and answered here before and if so I apologize, but why out of the 7 US planes added to the game so far is the Catalina the only one that is categorized with it's name? It's rather confusing to only have the planes be referred to by their prefix and only made all the more confusing by the fact that they aren't all categorized that way. What makes the Catalina so special? Why aren't they all assigned their actual names? One more reason I find this so bizarre is that I've never seen this type of reference behavior anywhere else: most things I read or watch consistently refer to the planes as "Hellcat", "Dauntless", etc. and only ever add their prefixes when the planes are first introduced or technical data/alternate variants are being discussed, and that's always as prefixes immediately followed by their names, not isolated on their own (so always either "Hellcat" or "F6F-3 Hellcat", rarely just "F6F-3").

Has any reason been given for this, and if not, can anyone take a reasonable guess? An attempt to avoid confusion with their Abyssal equivalents seems unlikely given that Abyssal equipment can't be used by the player, the Abyssal plane names are translated into kanji while English terms and words are usually transliterated with katakana (Catalina is on its card in English anyway), and the Abyssal planes look nothing like actual planes so confusing their appearance is unlikely. Avoiding confusion with alternate models (F4F-3 vs. F4F-4 for example) also seems unlikely given that the game has no problem referring to the various different models and variants of the same Japanese planes with their names. Is there some other reason or cause that I may be overlooking, maybe some method that the Japanese have for categorizing their own military planes that differs from the US that makes leaving the names off make more sense to them? 