Schwarzfeld

It is, but when I've watched guys cut the throttle landing Spits, Mustangs and P-40s workin at air shows I never did hear that kind of backfiring at all. I recently installed DivePlane's Spitfire sound mod and it cut down much of the backfiring.

Gonna be kinda difficult for the devs to really implement well/accurately to the satisfaction of the majority of nit pickers :P Having worked with warbirds in a flying museum collection, I can say with first hand experience that how much smoke the old radials or water coolers spat out on startup varied widely based on: - Atmospheric conditions - How long its been since the engine had its annual - How low it was on oil - How warm/cool the engine was - How many shots the pilot requested for the primer (they're external on some old-oldies) - How new the engine was - Whether the flight engineer remembered to enable engine oil feed pumps or not prior to startup (that actually happened once LoL) - How well maintained the ignition system was - How good (quality) the fuel was/is Soooooo Its kind of a crapshoot lol

^ What he said, myself being a semi-reformed street racer from California. Really enjoyed those little 2.0T rear wheel rice rockets but when you crank 400whp out of em, you better learn that smooth inputs technique with your feet AND hands or you end up sliding off the side of Pacific Coast Highway into some rich dude's pool real quick. My CFI in the Cub hugely disagreed with the run up and down the strip with the tail up thing, he drilled me shooting landings from the first hour, but everyone's different, students and CFIs, there's a type of each for the other that will be compatible. Absolutely right about the quick jabs and stopping the nose before you line it up in a single hit. One takeoff I made that was particularly jabby, my CFI said "So, you're a street fighter, I'm a pro boxer, you hit with hard fast jabs really quickly, I dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee... which one of us is gonna eventually win that fight?" He used to tell me "Its the same principle as learning to shoot [a handgun] - slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Once you learn to do it slowly [stopping the nose, then gradually feeding inputs with returned movements to straighten it] then you can learn to do it quickly, but it's not something I can teach you to do - you gotta figure it out on your own while I'm here to catch you before you kill us."

Then I bet you dollars to donuts Herr Brunotte was a pro at getting that Unicycle of Death up on the mains right the **** away as soon as possible so that the thing was more controllable on take off; having a loose tailwheel on the ground just makes your balancing act even harder. Concur on the brakes for takeoff - as I understand it thats kind of an all-around no-no for obvious reasons but as I learned doing short-field practice out of Mina's airfield in DCS 2.0 (I've been there in person, its... its not at all like DCS renders it, lol, its just a strip of sand with tires marking the "runway") and I did find myself using right toe to keep it straight while rapidly throttling up to make wheels up before I ran outta runway. Unrelated sidebar: At the REAL Mina Nevada airfield, you could run long into the sand and take all day to take off, but eventually you'd run into some trailers, a ghost town fulla meth heads, then a highway, and more or less in that order...

IMO if you wanna be a hot dog and fly the 109 on take off with an unlocked tailwheel, you better get the tail up and roll on the mains ASAP once you get rudder authority and dance the brakes up to that point. Frankly, in a plane with that narrow of landing gear and as fast as the 109 needs to get going for full rudder authority, personally I think unlocking the tailwheel on the 109 in the sim is just showboating - you'd NEVER do that in a real one, EVER.

...... yes, you do need a dead zone or a curve, if you've ever logged real time in an aircraft, specifically a lightweight taildragger (piper cub as an example) it is IMPERATIVE that braking not be instantaneous. In the cub, you need to be able to rest your heels on the brakes without actually applying any force. Same for toe brakes in a normal acft, you need to be able to have your toes resting on the brakes ready to apply, hence the curve and/or deadzone when set in DCS - if you don't judiciously apply a good curve and deadzone, you end up with useless brakes in DCS that are only really good for killing you and your plane.

Get yourself an X-56, I use the thumb stick on the joystick as the Spit's brake lever, it works PERFECTLY allowing me to modulate my braking. Honestly dont think I'd be able to fly the Spit well without it. I used to use one toe brake axis for the MiGs and the Spit but after I got the X-56, man I never looked back lol

Gents - after a couple months I think I have my Obutto Revolution cockpit the way I want it, my MFG Crosswinds on the way, three monitors across the top and one little one below the center - which I'd like to use with Helios to export instruments. I'm reading up on Helios and FAQs for that etc, and will likely take a while to get the hang of writing LUAs to do what I want, and thats looking pretty promising... That being said, and I apologize if this is a stupid question, because I'm a texture artist, not a coder - is there a way to export a saved snap view in a specific acft's cockpit to my little lower monitor, e.g. save a snap view of the Spitfire's HSI and the lower instruments (my center monitor is an ultrawide) so that I'm not looking down so far w/ TrackIR and going heads down too often? I've got a 1070 onboard with an i7 so plenty of horsepower, I'm just new to multi-monitor configs in DCS. Greatly appreciate any comments pointing me in the right direction to learn my way around this stuff, hopefully this isn't a question you guys are sick or hearing asked, I did search but found little/nothing on the topic.

The trick on landings, as with any tailwheel, but MOST especially with the DCS Spit, is this mantra, just repeat it over and over on your descent: The straighter you keep the plane on final, the easier it will be to keep it straight on touchdown & rollout. Line the nose up with the runway using your feet, place the aircraft on the centerline with aileron, control airspeed with elevator, fix the glideslope with your throttle, and power to the ground. Chant that until you hear it in your sleep. Even in a stupid crosswind where you find yourself cocked at some stupid bank angle and doing a full slip to stay lined up, that basic fundamental will allow you and the aircraft to be re-usable every day of the week.

^ What he said. In my personal experience the best way to avoid this is to put the aircraft up on just the mains as soon as you can. This is difficult because it makes staying straight with your feet very dicey for a simulator pilot because you don't have any ass in seat feedback. I was taught by my Cub CFI to immediately go up on my mains and give it full beans to achieve max speed ASAP. At this point when you are on your mains during takeoff, you now have full authority on WHEN you want to takeoff, whereas a stick neutral takeoff in which the acft takes off when its good and ready, and then you gotta reactively push the nose down to avoid ballooning/stalling etc. Some aircraft in DCS are just flat out holy hell challenging to do this with RE: taildraggers - putting a 109 up on its mains on takeoff once you've achieved rudder authority airspeed is dicey as hell simply because of how narrow the mains are, so I personally avoid this technique with the 109. The 51 and the 190 have a very wide track main gear set, so getting up on the mains once you achieve rudder authority is easiER, but still not easy to do because again no ass in seat feedback in the sim. The Spit adds a whole new layer of complexity to this method because of its stupid shopping cart tailwheel, but on the other hand, if you can manage the spits tailwheel in a stick neutral takeoff, chances are you can master an up-on-the-mains takeoff because the spit (at least the DCS simulation) achieves rudder authority in a stiff breeze, like... right away. So my advice to you with the spit in DCS is to treat it like you were flying a Piper Cub or something equally small and kite-like - get it rolling straight and get it up on the mains as soon as you can, keep it straight with your feet (this is HARD because of that pneumatic braking system, you'll need to assign that to an axis controller of some kind, I use my X56 thumb stick for it) and then as you gain full rudder authority you use just your feet. You'll get airspeed up much quicker taking off on just your mains once you get your tail up, which you can do almost immediately in the Cub, and very quickly in the DCS Spit. Now that you're up on your mains you can accelerate much more quickly and YOU can tell the plane when its time to take off, and have a much better handle on ballooning and preventing a stall over the runway. After all, practicing stalls over the runway at 100 ft is pretty much just the worst place to do such a thing :) Its also worth noting that you gotta treat the joystick (as one pilot told me at GLS, "program the stick, don't move it") like a very delicate lady, and maintain relaxed, gentle movements, even if they need to be large movements, in ground effect and on take off when all kinds of dynamic forces are rapidly changing with that big V12 up there revving up, the tendency for almost all of us to get nervous, tighten up and start making sharp inputs to correct, because we're getting genuinely frightened about screwing up the takeoff.

Er... well, yeah, I guess I missed the gist of what he was trying to say. Obviously a taildragger always wants to get ass-first on you on the ground, so yes you are right thats a true statement RE: physics. I worked the ramp at GLS with quite a few CAF types, worked a couple airshows they put on too. They've certainly got some hot pilots but man some of those birds of theirs are not kept in the best shape lol, the BT-13s they fly as "Zeros" in the Tora! Tora! Tora! display can really hotbox a hangar on startup lol

Wow I totally missed this comment. You are incredibly incorrect lol, tailwheel aircraft are only unstable taxiing if the pilot doesn't grasp the concept of the fact that he's not done flying the plane till the prop stops and he kills the mags lol

And then eventually, the option to UNLOCK the tailwheel was removed altogether, same reason. Legendary as it was for killing pilots (even today, with the few left) I find the 109, difficult as it is, to be a far more forgiving acft to takeoff/land, and its solely on acct of the locking tailwheel. It truly blows my mind the Spitfire would have been designed this way and everyone was just cool with it. Even the American piper cub and stearman trainers (which I've flown in) have tailwheels which lock to the rudder until you bring them outside of X degrees, they unlock, then you pull em straight and they lock back in.

My only gripe thus far on the flight dynamics of the Spit is the fact that I find it very difficult to believe the plane was so well behaved RE: sideslip and the rudder, it seems to require an awfully little amt of rudder while at speed and flying wherever if is you're going, regardless of the wind. Keeping the ball in the middle is a full time job in the 190, 109 and the P-51 (granted the 51 has very nice, fine adjustment rudder trim!), and I remember in the Cub your feet never really took a break no matter what, unless you found yourself dead into the wind... the Spit, especially in turns and when advancing or pulling throttle seems to require an unrealistically small amount of rudder input. In the 109, you can literally steer the nose with the throttle by torquing one it up or down and the ball will keep you busy all the time, period. In the spit, its like the rudder is on rails most of the time at speed, is that just how it was for real, and it was just that well designed, or....?

Correct, right before I moved to Dallas, Lone Star Flight Museum broke ground on the new facility - at the Christmas party last month at GLS the Museum President told us the EFD facility will be taking on staff by september of this year. Drive over to EFD, its the first thing you can see now from the main HAS sign entrance off the freeway, its a giant hulking black steel frame-up right now. Gonna be awesome, shame I can't work every weekend like I used to. I marshalled acft, led tours, worked for the A&Ps doing maintenance... my first day was doing annual greasing of all the zerk fittings on/in the B-17G - man that plane is BUILT out of zerks. Really miss the crew down there, they are great people and a great family.

I started learning tailwheel out in Angleton with a crusty old racing pilot from his grass field, he took me to LBX for wet pavement fun one day.... had me do a touch n go behind a Dow jet for shits lol... I volunteered at the flight museum on GLS (moving to EFD soon!) when I lived down there. Man I can't imagine flying in and around Houston proper for a living though, the air traffic is bonkers. Moved to Dallas recently, much nicer weather for a California boy like me.

Yikes. My CFI in the piper cub would have reached from behind me and severely injured the side of my face if he'd caught me fumbling with any controls on landing and rollout other than the stick pedals and throttle lol

I just did a flight on lunch hour in which I pulled KTKI weather (where I live) and we've got flurries of snow and solid overcast; punching through the clouds in this damn plane means you gotta ignore the ADI and maintain attitude by watching the slip needle, turn indicator and VSI, and mentally construct your own attitude indication based on those. From what I read, the original Spit's ADI was genuinely a piece of crap (by today's standards) that did only right itself after you fly it straight for a bit, then it would go all wonky again once you move around a bit. Definitely not an IFR bird...

Try going over to SFX (https://sfx.thelazy.net/downloads/) and downloading SFX 2.0 ReShade 1.1.0 (thats the version I use anyway) and then run ReShade setup once you've installed it to the directory containing the DCS executable. It will then re-name the correct DLL - there are a couple DLLs - one for DX9/10 32 bit, one for DX9 64 bit, and one for DX10 64 bit/32 bit (ReShade64.dll I think). If you're on DX11 (I am) that file is named dxgi.dll, so if you downloaded my zip, just rename dxgi.dll to the 64 or 32 bit name as appropriate, use the original download as a reference though...

Yeah, I'm sure 2.5 will be out just as soon as my son graduates college lol

.... personally I'd really prefer we had the option to use a normal UHF/VHF radio stack like we would in a civilian aircraft, these programmable channel things are all very historically authentic, but for the Love of God they are annoying and impractical when you want to change your destination or fly somewhere you didn't already program into your little old-school radio box.

.... it works though, so... thumbs up and I'm happy lol

I think the only time I found landing rollout to be a low workload period was in a 172 or a Cherokee/Arrow when I was a kid learning to fly at KSNA (John Wayne Airport, California coastline), but then again, A.) Its a 172, any idiot could fly one, and B.) The weather is always great there, and small acft have a dedicated rwy so no wake turbulence from the heavies. Almost every acft in DCS thus far that I've seen requires max attn during landing rollout, oddly enough some of the jets I find more difficult to curb the hunting and pecking vs. the taildraggers, I find the 109 my personal favorite, its narrow gear has taken literally months to master but now that I own that portion of it, I feel like its really quite easy on rollout once you train yourself to throw aileron into the wind, rudder as needed for x-wind and you're able to eyeball the rwy sidelines and tap the brakes to keep it straight. Still though, thats an acquired skill and screwing with stuff on rollout is a bad habit to pick up.

My CFI in a piper cub once bit my head off for touching down and then immediately pulling the carb heat during rollout. I didn't deviate off centerline but he said with so many more cuss words that rollout is the hardest and most important part, you can fumble with levers later. Agreed on the pulling flaps up on touchdown, my very first CFI in a 172 said very frankly that you can mess with the flaps once you've cleared the active. Aside from that, if you're still catching air, you (like bongo said) touched down too soon, too fast. Best way to slow an airplane down on landing and on initial rollout is to have stalled it over the pavement, stopping it with the brakes is for taxiing or the very very very end of rollout, in my experience. In the Piper Cub, I think I only ever used the heel brakes to pivot tightly while taxiing, or finally stop the aircraft in front of the hanger, and nothing else.