B,
Greetings generally .... and, likewise, Seasons of the same for when you awake in an hour or two ... haven't seen you around for some time ... the relaunch of the pointy bird presumably is keeping you busy ? .. and you will be pleased to hear that the Antipodean weather is a tad warmer than you are probably experiencing just now ....
I'm with you .. your story is eminently logical and understandable considering the Industry atypical needs of your particular machine ... and I suspect that many of us would be only too pleased to have to endure such rigours ..... but having no data on the 738 I am a bit mystified by this thread.
Normally one would expect a target for subsonic aircraft to be somewhere near 25 percent (and considerably further aft for most of the time on your steed, of course). Indeed, as on Concorde, the later Boeing and Airbus machines employ tail tanks to facilitate this in order to stretch the range a bit. One 744 operator, for instance, did a study some years ago and found that they could push the Boeing standard fuel program even further and pick up a commercially significant benefit on payload-limited sectors .. which was a consideration for their network.
I am interested in finding out the reason for this apparently strange circumstance. Then again the 800 has the odd idiosyncrasy or two ...for instance, I understand that the stab schedule is skewed forward compared to the earlier models to increase rotation stick load in turn to reduce the likelihood of tailstrike ... I wonder if this has something to do with the preference for a somewhat forward CG ?
I find it unlikely that Boeing would have done the work to vary performance weights with CG for this aircraft .. apart from an envelope forward limit spike (or some other interesting forward limit restriction) providing the opportunity to increase RTOW with an aft movement of CG, I am, I must confess, just a tad bemused by it all .....
FH, you couldn't list the AFM envelope limits on your machine for us and indicate the typical wt/CG position where the problem arises by any chance ? If you are targetting somewhere near the forward limit, then I would be looking for a spike in the envelope ......