Wear

[Yellonet]

Wouldn't it be great if DCS would model mechanical wear and fatigue?

I'm not aware of any other simulation that has had that feature.

 

This would affect basically everything that moves or get forces applied to them, tyres would become worn out and get worse and worse grip and eventually explode if you don't get new ones before that. The engine will gradually lose power as the parts get worn out and become more prone to failures, vibrations could occur and so on... same goes for the whole drive train and other mechanical devices. Metal fatigue might affect rotors, and later on when we have fixed wing aircraft, repeated high-G manuevers would eventually lead to metal fatigue and might make you lose a wing ;)

Well these are all just examples, there are tons more things that could be affected by this mechanic.

 

Adding a feature like this would increase the realism of the game quite a lot, because since when is having loads of identical factory new equipment at all times realistic?

 

Maybe this would come to play it's role best in a dynamic campaign where your spare part transport could become bombed and you'd have to fly without most of the essential repairs.

 

But of course this could be used for single missions too, you could set the wear by age and service history of the aircraft or just manually set the wear on different parts.

 

Perhaps the best part about all this is that it wouldn't be that hard to implement, no new animations would be necessary, the damage modeling is already there, somewhat simplified you would "only" need a system to keep track of how much a certain part has been used and then depending on wear level introduce behaviours such as vibrations, less responsive, less grip and so on depending on the part and heighten the chance of critical errors.

 

What do you think?

[Shaman]

Hell to much work. I work in spare parts management team, and I'm telling you - it's just so many of them - just consumables and rotables... Interesting is, what for do you need wear of every specifical part? You actually between missions expect your heli to be serviced! Also if you want you can only disable some systemsm, set even at what time period you want them to fail and % chance of failure (already in Lock On). That's pretty much same thing.

[-akyla-]

It is possible (i think) And it would be awesome too!

it will add a lot of realism and so on, but it will take about 2 years or so to blow that tire up :megalol: (2 years in real life, maybe just for me because i'm a weekend flyier:) )

 

Cheers !:)

[Yellonet]

Hell to much work. I work in spare parts management team, and I'm telling you. It's just so many of them, consumables, rotables, structural parts. Interesting is, what for do you need wear? You actually between missions expect your heli to be serviced, and if you want you can only disable some systemsm, set even at what time period you want them to fail and % failure (already in Lock On). That's pretty much same thing.

The difference is that instead of the part being 100% functional or 0% functional as it is now it would be a sliding scale with performance/safety gradually getting worse. Still functioning but not as good as a new one, sure with electronics this boolean approach to damage/wear modeling works, but it's not very convincing when it comes to mechanical parts that often gets worn out gradually...

 

Possibly the coolest thing would be that the aircraft would be very personal in nature, two helos/aircraft would never be the same, just as in real life, their "personality" depends on their history of use.

Just think about it for a moment... pretty cool isn't it? ;)

[Yellonet]

It is possible (i think) And it would be awesome too!

it will add a lot of realism and so on, but it will take about 2 years or so to blow that tire up :megalol: (2 years in real life, maybe just for me because i'm a weekend flyier:) )

 

Cheers !:)

Yeah, unless you make a few repeated hard landings, then later getting back from an easy mission going in for an easy landing you might get surprised ;)

[Vekkinho]

Well...there was a failure editor in FC...so expect some failures in BS too...

[Yellonet]

Well...there was a failure editor in FC...so expect some failures in BS too...

That's no way near the same thing ;)