Echo38

So've I. You do realize that the P-51 weighed ~10,000 lb.? That's, what, five times the mass of a Cessna 172? And you're surprised that the P-51 has a much larger problem with accelerated stalls and a wider turn radius? But, I'm sure you'll just skip over this post like you ignored the others. [shrug] Your loss, not ours.

Better to make sure it's locked before takeoff, instead. After you've taken off, you won't be able to lock it before landing, and if you come in a little bit crooked (e.g. one wheel touches first and you yaw a bit), you may not have an opportunity to lock it until after you've already groundlooped. I find that it's difficult to get the tailwheel to lock even when I'm already going mostly-straight, so it's best to ensure that it's firm before throttling up for takeoff.

I like it. Is this by the same guy who did the music for P-51D? (Konstantin Kuznetsov, I think?) Edit: yep, looked on the artist's profile, and it's him. : )

It's difficult to avoid groundloops on takeoff. But keeping it from looping on landing should be a piece of cake, as long as your tailwheel is locked. I can only assume that you're taking off (and thus landing) with your tailwheel unlocked. Ensure that it's locked before you throttle up for takeoff.

This issue has been discussed to death and back. Bottom line is: the problem is with our shoddy plastic joysticks, not the sim. Try to fly a real aircraft with nothing more than what we're using, and you'll have the same problems.

It looks to me as though he was asking about how to get the AI pilots to tighten up their formation, not asking for advice about how to fly in tight formation with human players.

The average player on the servers I've been on is less deadly than the AI, but the very best human pilots are considerably more deadly than the AI. If you've ever had the opportunity to duel Viks ... well, he makes the AI look positively incompetent. His energy management is just as good, and his gunnery's almost up there with it. Looks like you got unlucky! I've never been strafed on the runway in this sim, except by my friends who were goofing off. I think you'll have plenty of flights which don't begin with bullets before you've got some air under you. Don't take a couple of bad eggs as representative. : )

That bird outflies yours because of practice--or, rather, lack of it. If you practice enough, you will eventually get to the point where you can outfly the A.I. fighters. You can even defeat them while handicapping yourself, although it'd probably take quite a while to reach that point. You can't expect to pick up a violin and outplay a world violinist after you've only had a few months of practice, you know? Same thing with fighters. It takes hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours to really get the hang of virtual dogfighting.

If I understand you aright, trimming the elevator causes your physical stick to move to the side? This should not happen. As Weta43 said, trimming the elevator should move the stick on the pitch axis, but it should not on the roll axis.

WWYYD? "And I am right, And you are right, And everything is quite correct!" --William S. Gilbert

It's actually the curves, not direct input, which make the high-speed stall easier to trigger. Direct input gives you full potential precision at the stall area, whereas the typical curve "borrows" potential precision from around the edge-of-the-stall area in order to create a larger margin of error in the straight-and-level-flight area. The result is that, when stall fighting with a curve on your stick, any motion you make is (unrealistically) magnified; at a point where 5% more back-stick won't cause a stall in real aircraft (and won't in the sim with direct input), 5% more back-stick can cause a stall because the curve is amplifying the motion (it has to, because there is a finite percentage of 100 and you've "borrowed" some of it to give to the center). I certainly agree that our shitty plastic joysticks lack the feel of real aircraft controls; I'm one of the loudest to complain about them! But, my experiences flying real aircraft taught me that direct input is closer to the real thing than curves & dead zones, even with SPJ's.

[nod] That's how it is in the real aircraft. Even the decades-old Cessnas I flew had crisp, precise responses. I hear talk about loose cables, but every real aircraft I've been at the controls of had almost infinitely superior responsiveness to our SPJ's. Curves exacerbate this difference, rather than alleviating it.

At our local radio-controlled model flying club, opinion is split, with some RC pilots using curves et al. and others using direct input. I myself fly my RC aircraft only with direct input (linear/no curve, no dead zone), just like my sims. It was flying a (real, full-size) airplane for the first time which originally caused me to immediately remove all curves from all input devices permanently. I'll never go back. I was in the top ten on the world leaderboard for Rise of Flight, with a gunnery accuracy figure of ~27%, so I assure you as something of an expert that it's absolutely possible to perform very well in sims (as well as with RC aircraft) with no curves. I believe I wrote it earlier in the thread, but in case I'm misremembering, I'll restate: I recommend direct input (linear/no curve, and no dead zone) for pitch & roll, because any advantage gained via curve in the straight-and-level area will be lost around the turning-in-combat area, where you need precision the most.

Ball sports are way over-rated, anyway. [g]

Gosh, that interviewer was terrible! Just about every question he asked was a "leading question." I do not doubt that both of those pilots are experts--one doesn't get to fly old warbirds without being that. Still, I can't help but question the suggestion that the Me 109G has a superior turn rate/radius to the Spitfire V. I can't say that it isn't accurate (as I haven't flown any of them myself, of course), but I'd be very surprised if that were so! Say, who was that first pilot?

If the real P-51 has an 18" stick, and the sim models the P-51 as having an 18" stick, but we're using 6" sticks--then I can only conclude that our equipment is in the wrong, and not the sim. I use no curves (linear, direct input), and I don't have a problem making precise movements except for in the very center. Some difficulty being exactly straight and level, but not too bad. It's my stick's fault, not the sim. A better simming stick (Warthog, perhaps) would allow me to make precise movements even in the center. A floor-mounted stick would be virtually ideal.

I say, making the sim wrong to match our wrong equipment isn't the answer. "Two wrongs don't make a right," and all that!

Bear in mind that different models of the same aircraft sometimes had significantly different stalling characteristics. I recall that certain earlier model P-40s had nastier stall characteristics than the later ones. So, just because a document says that "the Mustang" has X stall characteristic doesn't necessarily mean that the P-51D should. He could be talking about a P-51B or whatever. Also, regarding "recovery is almost instantaneous": be very careful about subjective words like this. One man's "instantaneous" can be another man's "forever." E.g. the example of the "accelerated away very rapidly" P-40 that turned out to be only 400 feet in 60 seconds ...

Kinda a dumb question. Yo-Yo posts regularly (in English), and is very communicative and helpful to the community. He often explains in detail minute aspects of the physics, or gives us descriptions of what he's presently working on.

Yep--IRL, gunfire will not cause any noticeable shaking force on the stick which is not also present throughout the rest of the aircraft. So having the joystick shake more than the surroundings, as the real stick does not, is unrealistic. Eagle Dynamics is owned by the Fighter Collection. The Fighter Collection also owns a number of real WWII fighters, including a P-51. Nick Grey, who flies that P-51, is the man who initiated the development of DCS: P-51D. He spent much effort working with ED to maximize the accuracy of the simulation.

The occupation of flying requires knowing how to operate the aircraft.

There have been far too many half-way sim-games with lots of "airplanes" already. It's been happening for over thirty years. Lots of birds but none of them simulated well. Do we really want the only high-fidelity sim developer to become another one of these mediocre things? I don't.

The difficulty is irrelevant--what matters is how accurately it simulates the aircraft. A-10C is closer to a training tool than a game, which can't be said for FC3. Sure, some things are missing in the high-fidelity modules, but they teach a great deal about real flying. The medium-fidelity modules teach far less, as they are missing so much more.

If I were new to DCS, I could only take this to mean that FC3 is a high-fidelity simulator, which isn't accurate. That's my point. It's important to help the new guys know what's high-fidelity and what isn't, so no one gets "tricked" into buying the wrong thing. (There really ought to be a sticky thread which simply lists which modules are max-fidelity and which are simplified-difficulty.)

I wouldn't call it "arcade," either ('coz it has good flight physics, at least), but it's important to note that FC3 is not intended to be a high-fidelity simulator! His initial post made it sound like it was high-fidelity, and it isn't right to trick the newbies like that.