Echo38

There's also a way to edit them in-game, without ever opening the files. Should be much easier. I myself used the file editor (if only because I didn't know about the other way at the time), but you might want to give PeterP's method a shot: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=1844829#post1844829

I'm not trying to intimidate anyone. Just trying to let you know that necro'd threads can get on people's nerves. The moderators on these boards are pretty relaxed, but a lot of the other forums I've been to had a rule against raising old threads from the dead. Since there's no rule against it here, I doubt the moderators would ask you to stop, but don't be surprised if some people object when you resurrect dead threads willy-nilly.

No--sorry for the confusion--VFI, VFP, VFS = virtual flight instructor, virtual fighter pilot, virtual flight student. Virtual being the differentiation from real, of course ; ) I do have about ten hours of real-life flight time, but as a student and not as an instructor! Grounded for health reasons--I never would have stopped voluntarily. Yeah, that's why a lot of people don't like it when threads get randomly necro'd. I guess in this case it isn't such a problem, but I've seen year-old arguments become spontaneously lit up again as a result (often when the original participants no longer even observe the forum!).

Last post before yours was eight months old. You mind? I'm not trying to be the forum police, but it's generally regarded as poor form to "necro" a thread like that.

Thread necro alert! : D

[nod] And let's not forget bomber escort. The little friends had quite a bit of pressure on them; sometimes they had to dive away to live, but many of them didn't just scoot and run at the first sign of a threat, because unescorted bombers had a terrible life expectancy. This is one of the reasons P-51s engaged in dogfighting more regularly than one might expect of a high-speed heavy fighter. (Of course, "dogfighting" doesn't necessarily mean "duelling," nor tossing out your speed and parking on the other guy's six.)

When using throttle to control your altitude, you are going to be throttling up when you're too low. What happens if you go to throttle up, and the engine sputters and quits? You're too low--and now you don't have the power to gain enough altitude to make the airfield as you intended. I've known this to kill too many pilots IRL to not abhor this method. Whereas when you use stick & rudder to control your alt&speed, instead, you always keep an excess of speed until you're about to touchdown (at which point you increase your slip to bleed it off), so if you lose your engine, no problem. Hey? That's backwards--if you're controlling your speed with stick and altitude with throttle, and you suddenly you lose the power, you most certainly have to switch methods all of a sudden, because you just lost half of what you were using to control your energy state. Whereas if you're using stick & rudder to control it, and you suddenly lose power, no problem--you keep on doing exactly what you were doing, and nothing has changed at all in the way you manage your approach. Since you were already at idle throttle*, there's no difference. *As I mentioned earlier, it isn't a good idea to be exactly at idle throttle for a long time, because the engine can overcool, potentially causing engine failure if you suddenly go power-on for a go-around. For this reason, you want a small amount of power to keep your engine warm, but--to avoid relying on this power--you should counter this thrust with "additional" slip (in addition to the slip you're already using to bleed your energy--the altitude/speed you need to get rid of in order to land). To clarify: in a truly dead-stick landing, the pilot's going to use a heavy slip in order to bleed his altitude--or, he'll dive to lose altitude, then use the slip to bleed off all the speed he got in the dive. Either way, he's going to use a slip to gradually reduce his energy (that is the sum of his speed and altitude), until he's about to flare just past the beginning of the runway. But if your engine is working, you should have the throttle just above idle to prevent overcooling, and you use extra slip beyond what the engine-off landing requires, to cancel out the thrust that this keep-it-warm power is giving you. The cancellation means that you won't find yourself suddenly short of power if your engine does fail, which would cause you to be unable to make it to the runway if you were relying on it (as is done when you're using the throttle to control your altitude). To conclude, [stick = speed & throttle = descent rate] causes the pilot to rely on power, which tends to kill pilots when they have engine failure. [stick = descent rate & rudder = speed] ... well, this method isn't even so rigid as that; the stick & rudder are used together to control the entirety of the energy state. It's fluid. This method allows the pilot to be energy conscious and refrain from using the engine to increase energy during the landing process. While harder to learn, practicing it will greatly increase your survivability in the event of an actual power failure. (And the pilot never needs to look at the RoC indicator, by the way.)

Anyone able to confirm? I'm chalking it down to coincidence at present.

Actually, that reminds me--check out PeterP's instead--mine's just a kludgy thing, his appears to do everything mine did and much more: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=96116 (I haven't actually tried his yet because I haven't been able to fly the sim since before I knew about his.)

It isn't an opinion. Thousands of real fighter pilots did engage in dogfighting. They were trained for it and instructed to do so when necessary. For someone who doesn't want to participate in such a topic, you've been rather vocal about your notion, haven't you? Heck, you were the one who raised the subject. I'll agree with you on one thing, though--Candelaria's actual maneuver did not look anything like what they showed on the show.

Oh, hey! It's you : ) I setup my P-51D and A-10C cameras to be similar to my VHPGI for RoF. If you're interested in giving it a shot, or if you want a hand figuring out how to edit the DCS camera system, lemme know.

IRL, you don't want to turn on pitot heat on the ground because it can overheat and damage the pitot tube. However, that couldn't possibly damage your engine. If it does it in the sim (last time I tried it, several versions ago, it did not), then it's a bug. My guess is that your post-takeoff engine failure was coincidence--perhaps insufficient engine warmup (that's almost always the cause behind any just-post-takeoff engine quit I suffer).

Real P-51s engaged in dogfighting all the time. It isn't unhistorical for P-51s to turn fight, especially when facing similarly capable adversaries--the USAAF P-51 manual even recommended using combat flap judiciously to tighten turns. This tired old IL-2 crowd mentality of "real fighter pilots always boom & zoom, dogfighting is for arcade kids" is rubbish; there were plenty of real fighter pilots who regularly engaged in dogfighting, and survived to tell the story (and the guncam footage, too). As Merlin-27 already told you, whether boom & zoom or dogfighting is the right tactic depends entirely on the situation at hand; this is true in real life and in the sim as well.

Yeah, I only use the fixed sight as well. A good shooter doesn't need the gyro sight. (Not that I'm anything approaching a good shot these days.)

"Camera horizontal view" and "camera vertical view", in the "Axis Commands" category of the "P-51D Sim layer", should be what you're looking for. Bind mouse to those and you should be set. (Not sure why those aren't already bound for you; I rebound almost all of my controls, but I never had a problem with my camera getting unbound.) Unfortunately, no way to invert the external camera without doing the same to the cockpit one, AFAIK, at least not with mouse; it's possible to differentially invert them with key binds, IIRC, but that isn't what's being asked here.

Hey, Chief! Glad to see you finally got it. Yeah, you should install World. It's the program into which you "plug in" all your aircraft modules. The stand-alone versions are no longer being patched, only World, so while you can use the stand-alone if you don't mind an out-of-date version, World is pretty much necessary for multiplayer and stuff.

Dynamic weather, IIRC, is also responsible for the exploding-on-tarmac P-51 bug. I'd say don't use dynamic weather at present--it seems to be an unfinished feature.

Yeah. Ignoring the issue of engine overheating, max MAP and max RPM is the best thing for max speed. When diving very steeply, however, you may need to slightly pull back both throttle & propeller lever in order to keep your propeller from overspeeding.

Welcome to DCS! We just were having this conversation a day or two ago, so I'll just link you to that thread: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=115234 Enjoy the P-51! She's amazing, isn't she?

It wasn't particularly off-topic. I mentioned that part of the reason flightsims are harder than the real thing (on-topic regarding sim difficulty) is the visual problems of our monitors, at which point Tengah mentioned Oculus Rift (on-topic regarding visual problems). That's what it has to do with the topic.

Might work in lesser sim-games, but not here and not IRL. Dramatically reducing RPM while leaving the throttle at full will damage your engine. Instead, try what the real-life fighter pilots were trained to do, and it's what most highly-skilled VFPs do in a realistic sim: keep RPM at max in combat, and adjust throttle as needed. If you have to throttle back for a prolonged period of time to keep your engine from overheating, then drop the RPM to the proper value to match, but don't forget to put it back to max before throttling up. It may be technically more energy-efficient to pull back on the prop lever as well whenever you pull back on the throttle, but trying to smoothly juggle both levers will get a bit ridiculous and the risk for putting/moving them in the wrong place/order shoots up. That's why real fighter pilots kept it at max RPM in combat, barring unusual circumstances. Except for the engine heat problem, usually one throttles back when one wants to slow down, in which case lowering RPM to reduce drag is counter-productive.

It can take thousands of hours to become good at this. The first thing you need to do is decide whether you love flight enough to justify putting in the effort it could take to become proficient at virtual dogfighting. If you decide that you do, I'd say the next step is to try to get real-time help from people--those who are willing to share their time & expertise on voice comms, who can watch you fly, fly with you, and show you maneuvers & techniques. I can't imagine trying to learn something like dogfighting without help from others.

Dunno about that. It's a pretty heavy airplane, remember.

Just to point out--that proves that they do not always regrow, but it doesn't prove that they never regrow. (Just throwing that out--I've never had it happen, but I haven't been able to fly the sim since before the A.I. FW 190D arrived.)

Ah, yes--good call. I myself keep anti-skid off, because I prefer "stick & rudder" ships like the P-51; these don't have anti-skid, so relying on anti-skid when flying the A-10 teaches a bad habit, which will bite me in the nose when I go back to the P-51. : ) Anyway, to clarify, in aircraft which don't have anti-skid (like most single-engine prop aircraft), stomping on the brakes is generally hard on the aircraft and/or brakes, IRL. However, in the sim, brake wear isn't modelled (probably because the aircraft damage is not persistent from mission to mission).