Echo38

I don't know where it's set to on instant action (possibly sea level, as Tuco suggested), but when you get into the airplane on the ground, you should set your altimeter to the altitude of the airfield you're taking off from. You should also know what altitude above sea level this is, and the altitude-above-sea-level of the airfield you are planning on landing at (if you are not going to land at the same airfield you took off from).

I'm afraid I must echo these gentlemen! The maneuver described by the pilot is one thing, and the trick you saw in the show is another. History Channel screwed it up. What they showed is aerodynamically impossible for a Second World War fighter; their designs do not allow it to occur under any conditions. The CoG, CoT, and CoL simply aren't in a relative position for it.

A snap-roll is a controlled departure & recovery which is used to roll the aircraft faster than the ailerons can. This maneuver is executed intentionally, so if you're doing it by accident, then it is (as Jcomm pointed out) better termed an accelerated stall and/or incipient spin, rather than a snap-roll (because it's missing the "controlled" part).

Please, be honest. There's never been a flight sim featuring the P-38. Oh, sure, bunch of flying games have portrayed it (very poorly), but there's never been a high-fidelity sim with a P-38. The Lightning receives far less attention than the P-51 and the Spitfire, and perhaps even less than the Me-109. As to "nothing special about it," I'm perplexed; there are so many things about the P-38 that were unique to it, more of them than most aircraft. It was a singular, highly-unusual design -- revolutionary, even -- the likes of which was never seen before nor since.

Mhm. We found that the A-10C doesn't stand a chance in a standard-protocol duel against the P-51, but if you give the A-10C a 20% fuel load and the P-51D an 80% fuel load, it's a fairly even match. The P-51D still has an edge in maneuverability, but the A-10C has speed & firepower, and with my suggested fuel mass discrepancy, the maneuverability is close enough for pilot skill to make the difference.

Does this count? : )

Naturally, the P-38 is the queen of all things beautiful, and always will be. Of the list presented here, I must choose the P-47. A strong and rugged aesthetic, rather than a delicate elegance, it is none the less a wonderful airplane to see and hear.

You keep saying stuff like this, but I never see anything concrete, just grey-area stuff.

I didn't have much of a problem taking down a human-flown P-51 in a few short bursts, last time I was able to fly. The primary problems people have with this are their own inexperience at gunnery and/or their shoddy control setups -- even the expensive simming controllers are garbage compared to real aircraft controls. That said, yes, the damage model (especially its visual representation) is not one of the greater strengths of the sim. However, I should point out that -- compared to other sims/games -- it's at least sufficient. I don't recall seeing another sim/game doing it better by leaps & bounds, the way that DCS does flight physics & general aircraft fidelity better by leaps & bounds. Doesn't mean there's no room for improvement, of course, but I don't know that it would be wise to devote the amount of resources toward damage model physics that it would take to make a significant improvement. In a perfect world ...

Wrong fruit! And no more hints.

I don't think it would be tactful for me to say, but I'll give you a hint: something about a yellow fruit. ; )

DCS: P-51D has a level of realism that that other thing never came remotely close to having ... it never even tried. No sim or game featuring WWII fighters has ever been made to the level of fidelity seen in DCS: P-51D, or even half of that level, and you damn well know it. How could I be immersed in a flying game when the physics are all wrong and the aircraft don't remotely match their real-life specifications? No, thank you! I'd rather have a sim, thank you!

I firmly believe that the vast majority of the DCS community is on Eagle Dynamics' side. This angry vocal minority surely originates from elsewhere, not within the DCS community. (And I think I know where ...)

I agree that IL-2 often relied on imaginary figures for its aircraft & weapon specifications, and so I do not doubt that its portrayal of the roll rates of those two fighters was fantastically erroneous, as was so much else in its portrayal of things. Likewise, I concur that the IL-2 community in general tended to foolishly take the game's portrayal of things as gospel, propagating myths by using the game as a source for statements about the real things. However, despite this agreement, I caution against blanket statements such as "X had a better roll rate." At all speeds? At "normal" speeds? What constitutes "normal"? You get the idea. The only time that I'd be comfortable with a statement like, "The P-47 had a faster toll rate than the FW-190," is if that were true under all conditions. I'm not an expert on those two aircraft, but I suspect that each one rolled better than the other at different speeds -- my examination of other aircraft comparison graphs has indicated that this is often the case.

For one example, the pilot's virtual head is currently able to intersect the P-51's Plexiglas canopy while in first-person. It isn't merely cosmetic -- the pilot being able to move his head farther than he could in real life allows him to (unrealistically) see things which he should not be able to. Far from a game-breaker -- DCS: P-51D meets my standard & exceeds my expectations for a quality P.C. flight sim -- but annoying minor issues such as this one are, in fact, there. I discovered this "bug" (or "undesired feature," or whatever you wanna call it) on the first day that I installed P-51D -- back when it was still in beta -- so it doesn't take much of a test to locate this sort of issue. That said, Der Fred does seem awfully adept at imagining up extra problems which don't seem to really exist. : /

Both! If they ever come out with DCS: P-38L, I'll be spending at least 95% of my air time in the '38. However, I'm almost as fond of the FW-190 as I am of the P-51.

I believe he meant that the developers of other sim/games take issue with their products being discussed here. There was an incident where I posted, on this forum, a critique of a different flight sim-game by another developer, and one of the developers of that other sim-game saw it and was upset by it. That sort of thing is why Eagle Dynamics' forum moderators discourage other flight sim-games being discussed here. It has nothing to do with Eagle Dynamics having a thin skin -- to the contrary, they seem quite open to having their own sim discussed, with its strengths & weaknesses.

I trust that Eagle Dynamics will give this project the same standard of excellence as the P-51D.

Or perhaps the Fighter Collection has modified their P-51 to add this safety feature. I believe it was the P-38 which had a gear lock which could be overridden; it was pretty difficult to accidentally raise it on the ground, but in the event of an aborted takeoff, the pilot could still raise the gear under load (to increase friction, so as not to hit obstacles beyond the end of the runway) by depressing a safety button on the gear lever. I wouldn't be surprised if surviving P-51s have been modified to use a system like this.

It's good to see others experience the same wonder as I did. Welcome to DCS!

I love this! Wish I could participate, but the ol' hand is still FUBAR. One thing: I recommend using Teamspeak instead of Ventrilo. I believe the former uses up less ping than the latter; at any rate, more people I know use TS3 than use Vent.

This is in the current released version, or is this an upcoming change in the beta patch? Didn't see it in the notes. What a wonderful idea! I've been telling people to try DCS World, but I've always had to add the disclaimer that the free Su-25 isn't maximum fidelity. Now I can tell my friends about a maximum-fidelity free P-51 simulator which they can try, which they can then buy if they want the weapons. Very cool!

I don't remember the default key. Shift+Pause, maybe? Look in the General tab of the key commands.

Fred, what's your frame rate like in DCS? High, low? Is it steady or does it fluctuate greatly? My own tracks consistently get corrupted (more than half the time), even when just playing them myself. Now that you mention hardware, I'm wondering if it might be due to the fact that the sim struggles on my system, with low, unsteady frame rates.

With the Cessnas I flew, trimming had no effect on the position of the control surface when the aircraft was stationary on the ground. Only the trim tab moves, in that situation. Only airflow or yoke input could cause the elevator to move on the ground. (Or moving it by hand, as in the hinge check.) In the Me-109, on the other hand, I believe that spinning the trim wheel does result in the entire horizontal stabilizer (not just the elevator) moving, even at zero airspeed, because of the trimmable stabilizer system. Not entirely sure how the trim works in the 109; I got to sit in a functional Buchon on the ground, once, but I was too excited to think of examining the trim system.