Echo38

I can't speak for helicopters, but only for the P-51D and A-10C, as those are the only modules I own at present. My P-51 is twitchy as a cat on caffeine with direct input, yes; I don't disagree with you. I still find it difficult to make ultra-fine near-center motions in the P-51, and I've been using DI since 1999, so it's normal that you struggle with DI when you briefly tried it. Have you tried gradually reducing your curve, by small amounts, to give you time to get used to the more responsive settings, a little bit at a time? I recommend you try this; programming your muscle-memory (or whatever) with the "good habits" (in quotes, because real-life pilots don't have to learn them, 'coz they aren't flying with short-throw spring-centered sticks like we are) can take a very long time. I don't remember how long it took me to learn how to fly precisely with a short-throw stick, but I know it was longer than a couple of weeks, so if you've spent less than a dozen hours trying to practice with no curves, then you "haven't really given it a chance," so to speak. So, given that I don't see any other recourse, if the stick/chair mod is out of the question for now, I suggest at least trying to work on lessening your curve. Maybe reduce it by one point, and fly that way 'till you don't notice a difference, and then reduce another point, and so on. Sorry I can't be more help. The only two solutions I can see are a stick mod, and reducing/removing the curve. (Together, really, but half is better than none.) I'd be recommending the curve reduction even if you weren't having your specific problem with the center unresponsiveness; looking at your picture, you've got a very course curve, and that bites deeply into your potential precision at certain speeds/AoA common in combat. You're going to have a hard time dogfighting with that, because of the potential precision it's taking away from the "hard turning" part of the joystick's range of travel. So, I sympathize with your problem (I have my own share of hand pain & joystick problems), but I really don't know what else to say. Maybe someday commercial simming joysticks will be closer to real aircraft controls ... I expect that'll come around the time someone finally invents a practical jetpack. : /

In the sim (as well as in real life) zooming in with the camera isn't the same as moving the camera forward. They're two distinct actions with separate effects, even if they both (usually) make things "look bigger." Zooming doesn't alter perspective, but it does alter FoV. Moving the head/camera forward doesn't alter FoV, but it does alter perspective. If you zoom in, the HUD will appear bigger, because you've sorta put a virtual magnifying glass in front of your face. If you move your (virtual) head forward, however, the HUD will appear to be the same size, because it is collimated.

Hmmm. I'm certain it would help immensely to have a simming stick that were more similar, in length & position, to that of real fighter. Haven't tried one, yet, due to logistical difficulties. From my few hours flying real airplanes (years ago), I feel confident that a good simpit would solve pretty much all of my medical-related flightsim woes (which are all ultimately ergonomic problems, which aren't present in the real aircraft), but that's way out of my reach now, both in terms of technical skills & money. A simple stick extension mod would be far cheaper, of course, but does anyone even make one for the T-16000M? And I don't have the means to perform the modifications myself, to say nothing of what I'd need to do to my desk & chair, to make it all fit ... In other words, "Damn it, Jim, I'm a pilot, not a ground crewman!" Which is a little ironic, given what we were just discussing a few posts back. But I'd love to hear anything about a cheap solution that doesn't require one to be handy with tools. Ever since the surgeries, I can barely scratch out a few hand-written sentences, much less effectively wield a screwdriver. (As you can see, typing long-winded posts is no problem; ha-ha!)

For myself, I trim out completely when I'm extending. You know, when you're running from an airplane that's slightly slower but more maneuverable than yours, and you're on the deck and have little choice but to be pretty much straight and level, other than a slight amount of bobbing to throw his aim off (but not so much that you can't increase separation). In these cases, I'm at top speed (usually higher, for a while, as I just came out of a dive), and if I don't trim out, I need to hold quite a bit of forward stick during a chase that often lasts several minutes. This is true. I can barely fight for a few minutes in the P-51D without my hands starting to hurt, because I don't have time to adjust all the trim every time my speed changes during the dogfight. I didn't mean to imply that adding the desired function to the 109 would suddenly make me magically able to fly it; I probably would still struggle to do more than touch-and-goes. I meant, rather, that my own hand problems cause me to be more sympathetic with the guy with the un-modded Warthog who's really wishing he could trim a little bit more nose-down, to reduce wear on his hand. Thrustmaster joysticks have very strong springs, for such a short-throw device.

In fairness, the people I've seen wanting to adjust it in the sim don't seem to intend to do casually from flight to flight, but are just trying to set it once to fly more hands-off at their normal power settings. In the other thread, there's even someone who has the problem of holding the Thrustmaster Warthog against the spring being painful for his hands. With my own hand issues (and these old injuries are the only reason I don't own the 109K module, by the way), I understand that very much! Why? Is there a reason why it being hangar-adjustable (when it's out of beta, at least) would cause problems? Or is the problem that it'd be a lot of work to make it hangar-adjustable? I thought it was already adjustable, and it was just "locked," which sounds like a relatively easy change. Am I misunderstanding something? I don't recall seeing anything concrete about this.

Objectively, it doesn't make sense for something which was able to be adjusted between flights (in reality) to be actively disabled from being adjustable between flights (in the sim). I can understand if Yo-Yo didn't feel that the ability to adjust between flights was worth modelling (even if I disagree), because that was the ground crew's job, rather than the pilot's, and because many pilots surely never bothered with having it adjusted. However, while taking the time (& other resources) to model it might thus be fairly considered unnecessary, if it's already modelled, it truly doesn't make sense to disable it. If pilots could & did ask their crews to set it IRL, then--ideally--it should be so in the sim. Suggesting that it should be disabled in the future, because it wasn't meant for pilots to be tweaking it between flights, is like suggesting that we shouldn't be able to choose a fuel load of 15% capacity, because the pilots weren't meant to be taking off with such a low fuel load. It's a high-fidelity simulator; it's not a simulator's job to artificially dictate user behavior, to force them to conform to real-life recommended operating procedures. The simulator's job is to simulate the tools as they are in reality, and let the users decide what to do with those tools within the simulation (and let them see what happens when they use the simulated tools in a manner contrary to the recommended operating procedures--e.g. engine failure due to fuel starvation, or being wildly out of trim because of unwise adjustments in the hangar). Sithspawn, I agree that some of the { proponents of being able to adjust this between flights } aren't being reasonable in their demands. In particular, the accusation that the aircraft is "incorrect," because the pilot is unable to ask the ground crew to adjust the trim ... if this logic were applied elsewhere, then all of the aircraft would be incorrect, because we aren't able to adjust other things that the real ground crews could adjust, such as the engine governors--and that argument is, of course, silly. I would never say that the sim is "incorrect," merely because it does not simulate the ability of the ground crew to tweak & modify everything which could be altered in reality; at most, one could call it "incomplete" in this regard. I myself would simply say, "Some features of ground-crew operation are outside the scope of the simulation, which is primarily meant to realistically simulate the experience of the pilot's operation of the aircraft presented to him, rather than that of a pilot in full command of a ground crew." Would I prefer the sim to include more historical ground-crew options? Sure, all else equal, of course! But, I like to think I'm understanding of the difficulty of the development process. So, Sithspawn, I think we are largely in agreement on the core point--it isn't fair for them to call the sim "wrong" here. However, while I understand that it must be frustrating for Yo-Yo and yourself to see people accusing the sim of being "wrong," when you have a very reasonable basis for saying that it isn't, I urge you not to take the opposite extreme viewpoint from theirs, out of reflex. This is a grey area, and I see validity on both sides. In an ideal world, our sim would feature a ground crew that could do anything a real ground crew could do, and it would be up to the mission maker to decide what were and were not allowed in a given mission. However, that's an impossible ideal, of course, and we the simmers must understand that not everything is able to be built at once, and so different things must be prioritized differently. And we won't always agree on priorities. TL;DR? On one hand, Yo-Yo's right--it isn't actually an error, 'coz the adjustment function can reasonably be said to fall outside the scope of the sim, which is focused on the pilot's operation of the aircraft rather than the ground crew's. On the other hand, those stating it'd be a more complete & realistic simulation of the 109 if the trim tabs could be adjusted in the hangar, have a valid point, too. Both sides really ought to acknowledge that the other side has a reasonable stance, at core, and in the end, what it comes down to, is what Eagle Dynamics has time & manpower to add. So, Yo-Yo, I certainly don't call it an "error" to not be able to adjust them, but--if you should ever find the time to make all of the German trim-tabs adjustable in the hangar, if they were in reality, then I'm hoping for this. : )

I know that our spring-centered joysticks (I have a T-16000M, not a Warthog, but the former also has an overly-strong Thrustmaster spring) struggle with fine motions near center, compared to real aircraft controls; however, with practice, direct input on a spring-stick is ultimately capable of excellent gunnery accuracy, as well as extreme precision in general maneuvers. I've always recommended to my flight students to use direct input on the stick--no curves, and above all no dead zones. I've flown this way in flight sims since the day I first flew a real airplane. After my first flight lesson, when I came home, I immediately ... well, I took a nap; real flying is very tiring. But, afterward, I loaded up my flight sim/games and took all the curves off, and have never used a joystick curve since. It's true that SPJs (shoddy plastic joysticks) are much twitchier than a real aircraft stick, by nature of their short length (as well as poor construction and lack of airflow-feel), but direct input is still overall much closer to the real aircraft stick's operation than a standard curve is. In a real aircraft, it responds to the smallest of inputs; you never have to move it far to get a noticeable result, the way you do with a joystick curve. So, respectfully--I understand that I haven't exactly given you the answer for the question you asked, but I don't have one, other than this--I recommend strongly that you remove your joystick curves and begin learning to be more precise with your fine center motions. It's an acquired skill, and even real pilots find it difficult to get the hang of (because they're used to much-easier real stick/yoke), but it's quite possible, and I once was able to maintain (in a different flight sim/game, which displayed global stats) better than twice the average player's gunnery accuracy rating, while using direct input on a T-16000M. In short, removing the curve will still allow you to be reasonably precise in your center-area inputs (with practice, as I said), and will also inherently give you more potential precision in your more aggressive maneuvers, because removing the curve returns the potential precision you "borrowed" from that range of input, when you added margin of error to the center. All else equal, you should find general combat maneuvers much easier, once you've gotten past being confused by the different feel of the stick, which shouldn't take more than a week or two. (Straight-and-level gunnery will always be a problem for a direct-input short-throw SPJ, but most gunnery in the dogfight happens at higher angles of deflection than that.) And, furthermore, it'll solve your redundant-center-sluggishness issue.

Excellent. I've updated my previous post accordingly.

I'd wondered if this were possible. Can a script spawn AI fighters whenever there are fewer than X players, and de-spawn the AI whenever player count is >X ?

Startup options: both cold start & engine-running options available Map Settings: no icons visibility aids: none Required time to find combat: 1 to 3 minutes Objectives: none, just air combat Weather: good flying weather / mild crosswinds AI aircraft: when player count is very low TS availability: It'd be nice. The way I've always run my "instant action" missions in various flight sim/games was to have four to six air bases. The closest two are about a minute apart. The farthest are about three minutes apart. The closest pair has no anti-air defenses, so people who're mutually interested in quick dogfights can get into them quickly without having ack-ack spoil the fun. The farther two pairs of airfields have AAA, to prevent griefers from keeping people grounded. If there's a vulture strafing everyone taking off, then people can fall back to the rearward flak-defended bases. This system works quite well for those (such as myself) who enjoy instant-action ground-start missions, without having to worry about constantly flying into flak while dogfighting, or getting base-camped. The east side of our Georgia terrain has a few bases positioned relatively favorably for this setup, although not entirely ideal. I ran into this back when I hosted a dedicated server for Rise of Flight. Once you manage to get two or three people in, the rest usually follow, but almost no one wishes to be the first one (or second) flying around on an empty server, so servers other than the most popular one or two tend to be empty ~90% of the time. Unfortunately, I see no real solution to this, for any sim/game with a relatively low multiplayer population (~50 players on at any given time). However, AI which spawn when player count is very low could give people something to do while they wait for others to join. For me ... I only fly on max realism/difficulty settings, and pretty much only on quick-action missions with well-chosen planesets. The primary reason I never venture onto a public server in DCS is that there's currently no way to know what difficulty options any given server is running on. DCS 2.0 is to contain filter options; hopefully, this will include realism/difficulty filters. If there still aren't, I'll be pretty much guaranteed to continue to use my own server exclusively. (Private server, given that the population is much too low for me to justify dealing with the hassle of running a public one.) Unfortunately, flight sim/game multiplayer communities tend to be more divided than others, with about three major categories ("realistic & historical," "realistic & non-historical," and "unrealistic & non-historical"), as well as various in-betweens. On most of the flight sim/games I've used, there are about ~two major servers and the rest of the players make do with what they can find. There's just no forcing these categories together--many (myself included) would rather find something else to do than be forced into a category they don't enjoy--and the multiplayer community for a hardcore flight sim isn't large enough to sustain all three populations comfortably. So, yeah, I'm pretty darned particular about the way I enjoy flying. Any server I'll join has gotta be running max realism/difficulty options (even cockpit-switch pop-up labels are enough for me to write off a server), and it really ought to have bases set up so that I can get into a fight within a couple of minutes after wheels up. Some consider the latter to be simple impatience, but, to me, it's about maximizing the rate of learning. If one flies around for twenty minutes between every two-minute fight, then one only gets about six minutes of "learning time" per hour. At that rate, you'll never master it, not even after ten years of trying. At high skill levels, that low rate isn't enough to even maintain the skills, let alone improve them further (I've watched my students "stagnate" at a certain point on the learning curve, when they were getting less than perhaps 25 min. avg. combat time per day). The difference between two pilots with 1000 total flight hours each, one of whom does (on average) 20 min of flying to get to a 2min fight, and the other of whom does 1min flying to get to a 2min fight, is 90 combat hours and ~670 combat hours, respectively. Which isn't to say I never could enjoy a historical mission; in the past, I occasionally chose to fly (and even create) such missions. However, in general, I'm really not into that sort of re-enactment, and seldom engage in it. I love flying, not war. To me, dogfighting is something that ought to be a national sport, with real fighters & camera chaseplanes, which--if everyone were sane like me, regarding flying as the wonderful and perfectly natural activity it is ("if the gods had meant us to not fly, then they wouldn't have let us invent aeroplanes")--would be practiced & observed world-wide, instead of all the silly sports involving balls. Safely, of course, and not with real guns ... but this is quite the digression.

I clicked the Youtube link (thinking that a new musician was doing music for different modules), and I was thinking, "This sounds very much like Konstantin Kuznatsov's stuff," and then I clicked on the Soundcloud page. Oh, I see. That's why. : ) Yes, I very much like his music, and I hope Eagle Dynamics doesn't ever replace him with another composer, the way so many game companies do these days.

That isn't what he said. He said that the Russian test had a more rear-ward CoG than the German test, not that the CoG changed while climbing.

I can't honestly say I'm "happy to wait;" like everyone else, I "want it to be done now," naturally. However, I agree with Mr. Wagner, that it's for the best that it be released when it's ready, rather than being released before then. I can wait, and I expect it'll be worth it. (The multiplayer interface alone should be a complete game-changer, let alone the graphics & stuff.)

What sort of lower-detail area? Like what you see if you try to fly to Turkey on the current Georgia map?

As far as I know, no Second World War fighter had a stall horn. In DCS: P-51D, there is an audible change in the whistle of the airflow over the gun ports, as you increase angle of attack, so if you hear the whine, back off a bit.

Yeah, I'm having the same problem all of a sudden. It's odd, because, a few days ago, I was dogfighting the AI, and it kept happening to me the other way, continually, without even having taken fire from him. Eventually I figured out to keep an eye on my temps (not an easy thing while also keeping an eye on the bandit!) ... throttling back to max cont & unloading a bit for more airspeed, when things got too hot. But before that, the "bang stop" was happening constantly. It must be something that I do versus an enemy aircraft that I don't do when trying to replicate the effect by myself--something that I can't think of right now. Later, I'll have a dogfight and see what happens.

This is an easy, easy one! All you have to do is go WEP at 5000 ft. or less, and hold your airplane at ~100 MPH for maybe 30 seconds. You will hear a BANG and the propeller will instantly stop (a bit strange that it doesn't shatter going from 3000 to exactly 0 RPM in 0.0 seconds). You don't even have to manually shut the radiators, it'll happen even with them all the way open. Update: of course, as soon as I open my mouth, I can't do it--the propeller didn't stop when I tried this just now from an air-start. But every time I have a dogfight and try to do a few slow-speed hammerhead-type manuevers, this happens to me. As soon as I've had my coffee, I'll setup my equipment and see if I can't reproduce it in a dogfight vs. the AI.

At transonic speeds, sure. But at cruise speeds, only if the plane was very badly out of trim. When I was taking lessons IRL, for my first few hours, I used to ignore the trim; my instructor had to keep urging me to trim the airplane. I distinctly recall holding the yoke back for an ~8-minute climb when it was trimmed for straight-and-level instead of the climb; it did start to get tiring after a while, and eventually I trimmed it on my own, to my instructor's amusement. But it wasn't a "hard work out," and it wasn't a tiny input, but rather a lengthy deviation from the trimmed attitude. Things change for the harder when you're going 300 MPH instead of 120 MPH, yes, but the original statement is generally an overstatement.

Good catch! I've been doing it wrong, then. Looks like I need to rebind some keys so that I can hold more things down at once. I wonder what the various real-life P-51D manuals say about this. Hmm, I should go digging.

Hmm, no, wrong again. The DCS: P-51D manual says: "The Ammeter gauge indicates the amount of current being supplied by the generator. The gauge is graduated from 0 to 150 amperes and scaled to 10 amperes. Normal maximum current is 100 amperes and should only be used for a short period of time. Takeoff should not be performed if a reading of over 50 amperes is present." Trying to reconcile this explanation with what I'm seeing in the sim--so, then, it measures generator output, but this is dependent on the draw from the rest of the electrical system. Did I finally get that right?

Addressed a few posts back (first paragraph): http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=2402411&postcount=21

So, it looks like the problem is that I don't understand what the ammeter is or how it works. : D During one of my cross-country flights, I turned on the pitot heat & gun heaters (I generally don't need 'em for touch & goes, but if I'm going high and/or fast for long periods of time, I figure they could use some heat). The ammeter immediately shot up to the value it's supposed to be at. (You were right, Rookie.) So, apparently, the ammeter measures electrical power draw rather than generator output or battery charge. Is that it? Maybe I should RTFM again. (I've read it at least twice in completion, but I am a Bear of Very Little Brain and so my eyes tend to glaze when it comes to things like electrical currents.)

Here's a track of my last flight, recorded today. Startup, checks, takeoff, & landing. I was sloppy in a few things (in particular, I forgot to check my amps on my runup), but you get the idea. This is a typical example of where my temperatures are at, at each point during my touch & goes (although I only made one landing this time). The startup is exactly how I usually do it. Ambient temperature is 24 degrees C; there is a slight crosswind with gusts. A few things to note: I'm very careful to not allow my oil pressure to exceed the redline during startup and warmup. I don't know much about engines, so I don't know how much this matters. Also, I do exceed the coolant temp redline on takeoff; I always have this problem. However, engine operation always seems to be unaffected by this--I've never had a problem with the engine running poorly as a result (even half an hour to an hour later), as long as I throttle back to max continuous as soon as I'm a few hundred feet up, as I do in this replay (and on every other takeoff). I've had perhaps two dozen flight sessions in the last month. Usually, I do three touch & goes per session and then end the mission; however, I've had several longer flights, both medium-altitude (~20,000 ft.) and low-altitude (<1000 ft.) cross-country ones. No engine failures--other than that one time I mentioned before, when I failed to warm up at all, but simply executed a "YOLO takeoff" across the taxiway. That did result in an engine failure, a few seconds after takeoff (which I thoroughly deserved). If you still struggle with engine failures, take note of my temperatures (especially oil) when I begin taxiing, before & after my pre-takeoff run-up check, and so on. Note what I do with the radiators (fully open on the ground & during takeoff, in auto shortly after takeoff). Try to replicate the key points I've mentioned in this post (including the oil pressure, at least at first). the clockwise-spin approach.trk

Updated O.P. with an even quicker method I just discovered, similar to the last one.

For my part, I don't particularly mind if I can't trim it to fly nose-down, but I do expect to be able to trim it to be level (hands-off) at full power and max level speed. (And, with my messed-up hands, I'd need to be able to do so.) Are you saying that this isn't possible?