Tomsk

I think the current low-level air quake style lone-wolf scenarios just favour the 109 very heavily. I think things would be very different in a high altitude teamplay based match. First the P-51 out performs the 109 at high altitude, and secondly the P-51 is a plane that IMO benefits more from teamwork than the 109. All planes benefit from teamwork, but the 109 is a better "lone wolf" plane. I also think the P-51 could do with a bit of a boost in terms of gaining access to late-war engine settings and having an improved DM for the 50 cals. Teamwork really is the key to winning IMO. I am far from being an expert pilot, but feel free to ping me Integrals if you'd like to do some flying together as a wingpair some time. I really love flying in close communication with other people. I have a teamspeak / mumble server we can use.

– Callsign: Tomsk – Nationality: British – Lonewolf - Aircraft: P-51 or FW-190D - feel free to use me to balance the sides. – Time zone: BST (GMT +1 currently) I can't really do 9PM EST sadly, but I would be really interested in participating if you run a second session at a Europe friendly time ... for example in the evening GMT.

These ideas all sound fun, we should just try them and see how they go. I'd be happy with air starts, or ground starts and climbing up, or a WOL style set of ground targets, or longer missions with pre-planning and junk. It all sounds good fun to me :-)

Is it really sad that it's quite possible I'll read the manual first? :-)

Have all the others, definitely have my eye on the Spitfire and the P-47 for my two codes :-)

Ha :-) Everyone has a style and a set of things that work for them. I actually don't usually make the mistake of flaring too high any more since getting my rift (hoorah for depth perception, it really helps), but there are actually lots of ways to land successfully. I personally like landing with a little power, if you're happy to burn runway, gives you more time to settle the plane. But I don't find the plane too squirrelly at those speeds ... The video you posted is a really nice landing, only thing I'd say is that you say stay off the rudder whereas I constantly correct with rudder. I'd have been a bit uncomfortable being so far off centreline so close to the threshold and would have been all over it with the rudder quite a bit sooner. But that's just my preference, it was a very smooth landing :thumbup:

So I believe the outcome of air combat depends on pilot skill, luck and who has what advantages. For most scenarios between WWII planes the most important of these is pilot skill, for an expert pilot will generally defeat a rookie even if the rookie has all sorts of advantages. Having a faster, better climbing, better rolling plane are all advantages and if I was taking a Bf190K4 or a FW190D9 against a Spitfire Mk LF MkIX I would generally reckon I had a somewhat better plane. However, it wouldn’t be as important as other advantages such as speed, altitude and surprise. And that’s just 1-v-1, which most combat actually isn’t. Many-vs-many is far more complex and depends on so many things. That’s why air combat is interesting.

Personally I couldn't tell you how accurate the DCS FMs are, I'm not a pilot. I can say that of all the WWII sims I've tried over many years they are my favourite, they have a great consistency to them that I find very believable and satisfying. I find them a joy to fly. I'm very glad to see the DM is being updated. Is that also going to apply to the AI aircraft as currently they are perhaps the biggest problem?

Something I find really helpful in not making me feel as sick is having a fan blowing cold air on my face, seems strange but definitely helps me to feel less weird. Also helps stop the Rift steaming up :-)

I didn't have 1.5.3 installed but copied it from DCS World 2.0 and that worked great, thanks!

Currently there is no way to check your six at all. Why bother develop bubble cockpits, and Malcolm Hoods, and the Galland Panzer if pilots can't turn far enough to see anything anyway? In real life you can lean forward and swivel, plus you have a much wider FOV and you can move your eyes as well as your head.

Hi, Been playing with 2.0 a lot but came back to 1.5 to try some stuff out. Jumped into the WWII birds and it seems the pilot's view is far too restricted: it's not possible to clear your six at all. This is about as close as I can get: Was this changed recently? Is something wrong in my setup? It seems fine in DCS 2.0, where I can see the aircraft tail just fine. Thanks Tom

I'm really looking forward to seeing the P-47 in DCS. It's one of my favourite planes of all time, and it's contribution was very much underrated. You can make a strong argument that it was the P-47 (mostly the razorback versions) that really broke the Luftwaffe, by the time the P-51 arrived on the scene in force the Allies already had largely won air-superiority. Fantastic BnZ plane, dives and zooms like crazy, unmatched performance at high altitude, excellent high speed manoeuvrability, great armament, tough construction. As you say there are plenty still flying so knowing ED it will likely be an incredibly faithful representation.

Yes but not in diving ability, although the FW-190 was also an excellent diver. Not quite as heavy as the P-47 but a bit more aerodynamic. The Bf 109 however was not a great diver. As I understand it quite a few planes could keep with the P-47 in the initial stages of a dive, but nothing could really keep with it when it got going.

Yes although one of the things I really like about planes with good high-speed handling is that providing you have a bit of altitude, there's not much a pursuer can do to prevent you making it into a high-speed rolling contest.

Oh agree completely, better to be unpredictable. It's simply 'flat' in the sense that it is based on rolling for a bit, then pulling for a bit, then rolling again and so on. As opposed to a rolling scissors which is more of a continuous roll and pull at the same time (barrel roll). You can also use the vertical in a flat scissors to deliberately keep your pursuer from getting a shot. Roll to the left and they follow then when you roll to the right roll lower. That way when you cross again you are offset laterally (i.e. you are too far left/right for them to make a shot). Planes don't yaw very well so they'll have an almost impossible job correcting for a shot.

Sounds to me like a flat scissors, rolling left and then rolling right. And I'd guess the "rolling two times to the spit's one" is where he rolls left and the spit tries to follow, but before the spit has managed to roll left enough to start turning he's already rolled back right and is coming the other way. This would leave the spit basically flying a straight path and just rolling around its axis, while the P-47 is zig-zagging side to side.

Everyone has their own style but I prefer my way, I think it's more fool proof in a simulator. It's essentially the same, but if you do misjudge the height above runway my approach gives you a perfectly workable landing ... as opposed to a high stall followed by smacking the wing on the ground. IMO the safer approach is better. Also works better in cross winds IMO, landing at absolute stall is just riskier than "near stall". I've read that plenty of flight instructors recommend the same, don't just pull back on the stick until it stalls out ... keep it near stall and land with a little power.

Well no I do, but that's not what I focus on. I focus on keeping the plane straight, whatever rudder inputs that requires :-) I wouldn't advise "hold right rudder" though, because I found there's little "holding" it, it needs a lot of active correction in the Dora.

The trouble is that holding a plane inches off the ground without having any depth perception is not at all easy. You can learn to compensate for the lack of depth perception with practice, you can use "other cues" as to how high you are .. but they are imperfect. Stalling out inches above the runway is awesome ... but stalling out meters above the runway is not, and it's not always easy to tell the difference. As I say, I prefer to land with a bit of throttle if I'm not worried about having the shortest possible landing. As in my video you still touch down at the recommended 190 kph but everything happens slower, and I find it's more tolerant of being too high.

Oh yeah you can go way steeper but it does make it a bit harder :-) Just add more power if your plane is heavier. People tell you to chop the throttle right off just before the flare, and that does give a shorter landing, but it's not the easiest way to do it. Landing with some throttle still on is IMHO a lot safer if you don't care how much runway you use up. I've read that new recruits in the RAF had 20 hours training in a Tiger Moth with an instructor, then they basically get put in a Spitfire and told "right, off you go, there's a good chap". That could well be an exaggeration, but I doubt they could really have been prepared for what they were about to face. I have read it's quite a bit harder in a simulator: no depth perception (bring on VR!) and no seat of the pants feel, but even so ... you can't just press the "reset" button if you screw it up in real life! Really looking forward to getting to play with the Spitfire, especially with my Rift coming in August! Even though in many ways I think the P-51 and the FW-190 suit my preferred style a lot more. The Spitfire was known for being a lovely aircraft with very forgiving handling, I'm sure the DCS version won't disappoint.

So personally my thing is flying not tanks, so if it appeared I wouldn't buy it. However, I think it could be fun doing CAS for real human players fighting an actual ground war with other humans ... however, it's not particularly a priority for me. I also think the engine would need quite a lot of work to support it, both in terms of having more detail down low and in terms of supporting much larger numbers of players in multiplayer.

Yes don't come in too shallow, you want to be much steeper than you would land a jet for example. In general I find that a landing that is much too hot can often be saved, but if you aren't yet flared and the runway is disappearing under your nose then it's a go around, you can't save those easily. You get better at it with practice, there are also ways to land it when you are terrible at estimating the height. Here's a little example, sorry about the audio-visual quality, first video I've ever recorded. Such landings aren't usually the smoothest, or the shortest, but they get the job done without damaging the plane, my vertical speed here was about 1.5 m/s on touchdown which the FW-190 can cope with just fine. The key is leaving the power on, and just holding the nose at a particular attitude. Power on the Dora is usually set using RPM rather than ATA (unlike the 109), and here I used 1500 RPM. If you go a bit higher (say 1700 RPM) you get an even gentler (but longer) landing. It's one of the most challenging (and rewarding) things to do in DCS. Helicopters are also hard but once you've got hovering down landing them is actually pretty easy, at least landings that aren't really hot :-) But landing the WWII birds is really tough, you need to avoid "bouncing" which requires special techniques, the visibility is awful, you have nothing like an FPM marker or electronic aids to help, and you need to be very careful on the roll out because the tail will want to swing round on you.

Yeah it's all about the flare, especially in a taildragger. A lot of people don't really understand what the flare is for in a taildragger. So with a tricycle geared aircraft you can plop the thing onto the ground and it'll probably stay there, not so with a taildragger! The key to a three point landing in a taildragger is you need the plane to be out of speed and on the verge of a stall just as the main wheels touch the ground. If your mains touch the ground and the plane is not out of speed then when the wheels touch the tail will continue down with momentum and that will point the nose back up again and it will "bounce". If you get a bounce you need to "go around", don't try and saving a landing after a bounce. The best way to achieve a nice three point landing is that during the flare you cut power and fly the plane along the runway just above the ground letting it bleed off speed. As it gets slower and slower you should find you need to point the nose higher and higher to keep the wheels off the ground. Eventually that won't be possible anymore as the wing will begin to stall, ideally this will happen with the plane just skirting over the ground so that it stalls gently onto the ground. Of course the reality is that it's not easy to hold a plane inches from the ground with a constantly changing attitude, especially with no depth perception ... and you really don't want to stall a lot too high. So what most people do in practice is bleed off most of the speed and then let it gently drop onto the ground a bit above stall speed. You sometimes get a tiny hop as you land but it's better than stalling too high. You learn the "landing attitude" by knowing where the horizon should be compared to your front dash, you flare out until the nose gets that high and then you don't pull harder. I usually use an attitude similar to where the plane naturally sits on the ground, but with the nose a bit less high. When first learning it I would also suggest not cutting power until you are hovering comfortably above the runway, and cut it very gently. It will cause you to use up more runway but that's usually not so important. As you get more proficient you can cut power earlier and more aggressively for shorter landings.

So I've been learning the Dora recently and I find it's actually quite pleasant on landing, the wide gear give plenty of tolerance and it's a bit less squirrelly on the roll out than the Mustang. But then I've had a lot of practice with landing the P-51D. I've not managed to break the landing gear on the Dora yet and I've dropped it pretty hard (at least what I think is pretty hard). I do think landing in a simulator is probably harder than in real life, no depth perception, no "seat of the pants" feel. Tail draggers are a bit notorious for being hard to land, and the DCS ones are true to form. I can't be certain but I'd guess that if you're breaking the gear then you're probably landing with too much side slip. Landing gear can tolerate a lot of vertical and forward/back force but not a huge amount of sideways force. But if you post a video of a troubled landing I'm happy to give more feedback.