Flight model how is it and how's FFB

[Etask]

16 ore fa, Hummingbird ha scritto:

My question is wether it can really be true that the F4U was so unstable in yaw and pitch? Reading pilot descriptions it does mention light controls, but nowhere anything about directional instability in yaw or that its twitchy in pitch. Infact once cleaned up and in the air, it was supposed to be really easy to fly. So yeah, strikes me as very odd that the FM of this plane is so unruly in the air.

I know you can use curves to dampen the sensitivity in pitch, but it just doesn't feel very convincing even after that.

On a final note, this is ofcourse early access, so things are bound to change. In other words, Im expecting things will ofcourse improve with time.

I agree, FM needs some tweaking especially in pitch and yaw. It feels a bit too light and twitchy, and weightless. I’m using a 35 curvature on a warthog stick with a small extension and while it feels better it doesn’t feel right. In other warbirds I use 0 to 15 curvature. Also the behaviour when deflecting controls too much needs some adjustment; I know you wouldn’t do that in the real thing, but pushing down strongly on the controls, the aircraft starts making some weird maneuvers that an extra 330 would be embarrassed in comparison.

Now, that’s not to say it feels horrible and I don’t like the aircraft, quite the opposite I really enjoy it and it’s probably my favourite warbird in DCS already, thanks to Magnitude for bringing us this module, but please please adjust the FM!

 

[PL_Harpoon]

On 7/16/2025 at 5:00 PM, Hummingbird said:

Reading pilot descriptions it does mention light controls

Here's a million dollar question: does "light controls" mean that the aircraft controls do not require a lot of force to operate or that small movements produce exaggerated results?

I doubt it's the latter.

[Saxman]

41 minutes ago, PL_Harpoon said:

Here's a million dollar question: does "light controls" mean that the aircraft controls do not require a lot of force to operate or that small movements produce exaggerated results?

I doubt it's the latter.

If control forces are light it's easier to make bigger movements and potentially overcorrect.

[PL_Harpoon]

54 minutes ago, Saxman said:

If control forces are light it's easier to make bigger movements and potentially overcorrect.

True, but if <1cm movements* produce large difference in pitch than it's understandable to be suspicious.

*based on the stick movement in the in-game cockpit, not my actual joystick.

Try to compare stick pitch movement here with what we have in game.

 

I'm not saying the flight model is garbage but some tweaks are necessary.

 

EDIT:

Here's a better example. Compare the stick movements with aircraft rotation. Then try to replicate them in DCS:

 

Edited Thursday at 09:11 PM by PL_Harpoon

[Rob]

On 7/16/2025 at 11:00 AM, Hummingbird said:

My question is wether it can really be true that the F4U was so unstable in yaw and pitch? Reading pilot descriptions it does mention light controls, but nowhere anything about directional instability in yaw or that its twitchy in pitch. Infact once cleaned up and in the air, it was supposed to be really easy to fly. So yeah, strikes me as very odd that the FM of this plane is so unruly in the air.

I know you can use curves to dampen the sensitivity in pitch, but it just doesn't feel very convincing even after that.

On a final note, this is ofcourse early access, so things are bound to change. In other words, Im expecting things will ofcourse improve with time.

Curious as well.  After looking at various Corsair cockpit view videos on youtube today, I don't see any of the large amplitude, undamped yawing oscillations that accompany even tiny control inputs, even when trimmed.  Here is a video where you can see the pilots legs through several maneuvers:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-pBV5GD8flc

In the DCS corsair the pilot would be doing so much rudder work they would look like they were running in place in the cockpit.  I know such a video doesn't provide quantitative 'proof' by any means, so I'll just file it under 'interesting observations' and leave it at that.

Edited Thursday at 09:37 PM by Rob
grammar

[Zimmerdylan]

  For the past few weeks I have been really thinking about purchasing this module. But I have been stung so many times by ED and their associates with promises never kept, and issues never resolved that I am very hesitant. I have not purchased anything from them in quite a while. I do not own the Mosquito, or the newer 190 A-8. Which is very sad because I am a devoted fan of WWII stuff. After reading this thread, I'm glad I refrained from purchasing this plane. So....Thanks guys!

Edited Friday at 05:09 PM by Zimmerdylan
Grammar errors

[Etask]

3 ore fa, Zimmerdylan ha scritto:

  For the past few weeks I have been really thinking about purchasing this module. But I have been stung so many times by ED and their associates with promises never kept, and issues never resolved that I am very hesitant. I have not purchased anything from them in quite a while. I do not own the Mosquito, or the newer 190 A-8. Which is very sad because I am a devoted fan of WWII stuff. After reading this thread, I'm glad I refrained from purchasing this plane. So....Thanks guys!

I get your point, I was also very hesitant; however at the end I just pulled the trigger and I don't regret it.

It is not perfect, FM definitely needs some tweaking and I hope it'll get addressed...but it's still a good module, armament is great (just try tiny Tims or a bat bomb!), and carrier ops is a great addition to DCS WWII. 

I didn't wanna wait forever for it to be perfect or fixed 100% (if it'll ever be), I just wanted to enjoy it now. If you like WWII birds and if you like the Corsair, I would say just go ahead and get it. 

[=475FG= Dawger]

On 7/17/2025 at 2:32 PM, PL_Harpoon said:

Here's a million dollar question: does "light controls" mean that the aircraft controls do not require a lot of force to operate or that small movements produce exaggerated results?

I doubt it's the latter.

Its both.

Many moons ago, I flew the Emb-120. Un-boosted controls. At speed, the control column felt like it was set in concrete. When maneuvering, there was no discernable control movement in the pitch axis, just varying amounts of pressure, yet you could maneuver the aircraft reasonably well for an airliner.

The Lear 60 (also un-boosted) required 80 lbs of force during stall recovery to keep the nose up. I had a F-15C pilot training in the 60 and he wanted to try head on lead turn on a traffic target. He blew the pass because he wasn't expecting the huge control force required to generate G at speed.

So "light" controls is going to have a different meaning in an un-boosted aircraft. Not requiring both hands to move the stick would be light controls at 300 knots.

Many boosted jets artificially increase required control forces to prevent the pilot from over controlling because a little control movement goes a long way.

Most airplanes are going to require a fist or less aft stick movement to get to maximum G.

The Corsair videos above demonstrate this quite clearly. He clearly isn't moving the stick much in pitch and not requiring much force to do it.

 

Also, a note on rudder movement. If you watch the 'legs' video, that pilot is dancing on the rudders, especially during takeoff. You aren't seeing big movement once the speed builds because the rudder is more effective and he is correcting extremely rapidly, needing only slight changes of pressure to achieve the desired result.

 

If you watch carefully you can see the amount of rudder required at slow speed, high power versus high speed, high power by right leg extension.

[PL_Harpoon]

1 hour ago, =475FG= Dawger said:

Its both.

Many moons ago, I flew the Emb-120. Un-boosted controls. At speed, the control column felt like it was set in concrete. When maneuvering, there was no discernable control movement in the pitch axis, just varying amounts of pressure, yet you could maneuver the aircraft reasonably well for an airliner.

The Lear 60 (also un-boosted) required 80 lbs of force during stall recovery to keep the nose up. I had a F-15C pilot training in the 60 and he wanted to try head on lead turn on a traffic target. He blew the pass because he wasn't expecting the huge control force required to generate G at speed.

So "light" controls is going to have a different meaning in an un-boosted aircraft. Not requiring both hands to move the stick would be light controls at 300 knots.

Many boosted jets artificially increase required control forces to prevent the pilot from over controlling because a little control movement goes a long way.

Most airplanes are going to require a fist or less aft stick movement to get to maximum G.

The Corsair videos above demonstrate this quite clearly. He clearly isn't moving the stick much in pitch and not requiring much force to do it.

 

Also, a note on rudder movement. If you watch the 'legs' video, that pilot is dancing on the rudders, especially during takeoff. You aren't seeing big movement once the speed builds because the rudder is more effective and he is correcting extremely rapidly, needing only slight changes of pressure to achieve the desired result.

 

If you watch carefully you can see the amount of rudder required at slow speed, high power versus high speed, high power by right leg extension.

Makes perfect sense to me. Speed = more pressure but also more lift (by the power of 2 if I recall correctly) so with speed you need less movement and more force.

But my suspicion with the DCS Corsair is that it's too sensitive in pitch across the board. I'll try to record some footage to show what I mean.

[Cgjunk2]

I actually suspect that the Corsairs FM is just fine, but we have trouble "feeling" it because most of us are flying on spring centered joysticks that give the same pressure at 80kts as they do at 300kts.   It's the same for rudders, it's super easy to overshoot how much movement you'd need causing wild yawing.  I had a lot of problems with the huey and how it felt fake, until I really thought about how much movement I was commanding with my stick.  And since every overcorrection on one axis affects all other axes, it just felt bad.   In a way, I had to train myself to imagine forces on my joystick that weren't actually there, once I did (and when I got a joystick extgenstion), things started to feel more real.  

Most warbirds in DCS have a one to one relationship between the movement of the joystick and the movement commanded to the control surfaces, regardless of the speed.  There is good reason for this because that's how it works in real life.   The only exception is the Bf109 once airspeed gets high, where the virtual stick becomes stuck in cement despite your input...in order to simulate very high IRL control forces.  The whole idea of keeping a one to one relationship between joystick movement and control surface movement is really a philosiphical choice in how airplanes are simulated.  You could argue that forces are more important to model and then model things to where you have to move the stick more at speed in order to simulate forces experiences.   Either way, you can't have both displacement and force accurately simulated at the same time...unless you have force feedback.  

I suppose there's something to be said for a "filter" of sorts that would dampen your input a tiny bit in order to minimize the effect of micro-movements on our light spring-centered sticks, which could be done by delaying the transmission of signal from the stick to the simulation very slightly....  I could see a variable filter where micromovements are increasingly damped out with speed, but don't ultimately affect total control throw range.  It could give the impression of "weight".  I suspect that some modules might use something like this.     This isn't the same as curves, because curves just shift the sensitivity of the stick from center point and shift it to the extremes.  

 

Edited 17 hours ago by Cgjunk2

[Etask]

You’re probably right, however I suspect most of DCS users have that kind of joystick, so the issue of stick movement vs control deflection vs speed is applicable for all other warbirds (and most of other airplanes and helicopters). Maybe they do have that kind of “filter” you mentioned.

But then again just try to push the Corsair slightly out of it’s flying envelope (I know you wouldn’t do that in real life, but just for the sake of it), give it a nice nose down pitch command (even at low speed, where control deflection should be more accurate), and check out the airplane manoeuvring like a spaceship with no gravity…

FM is not extremely bad by any means but it does need some tuning. Aircraft has just been released, so I hope in the next few patches it’ll get fixed.

 

[Gunfreak]

7 hours ago, Cgjunk2 said:

I actually suspect that the Corsairs FM is just fine, but we have trouble "feeling" it because most of us are flying on spring centered joysticks that give the same pressure at 80kts as they do at 300kts.   It's the same for rudders, it's super easy to overshoot how much movement you'd need causing wild yawing.  I had a lot of problems with the huey and how it felt fake, until I really thought about how much movement I was commanding with my stick.  And since every overcorrection on one axis affects all other axes, it just felt bad.   In a way, I had to train myself to imagine forces on my joystick that weren't actually there, once I did (and when I got a joystick extgenstion), things started to feel more real.  

Most warbirds in DCS have a one to one relationship between the movement of the joystick and the movement commanded to the control surfaces, regardless of the speed.  There is good reason for this because that's how it works in real life.   The only exception is the Bf109 once airspeed gets high, where the virtual stick becomes stuck in cement despite your input...in order to simulate very high IRL control forces.  The whole idea of keeping a one to one relationship between joystick movement and control surface movement is really a philosiphical choice in how airplanes are simulated.  You could argue that forces are more important to model and then model things to where you have to move the stick more at speed in order to simulate forces experiences.   Either way, you can't have both displacement and force accurately simulated at the same time...unless you have force feedback.  

I suppose there's something to be said for a "filter" of sorts that would dampen your input a tiny bit in order to minimize the effect of micro-movements on our light spring-centered sticks, which could be done by delaying the transmission of signal from the stick to the simulation very slightly....  I could see a variable filter where micromovements are increasingly damped out with speed, but don't ultimately affect total control throw range.  It could give the impression of "weight".  I suspect that some modules might use something like this.     This isn't the same as curves, because curves just shift the sensitivity of the stick from center point and shift it to the extremes.  

 

The stick does not get noticeably heavier with speed using my brunner force feedback. The only force feedback effects I have that i feel is shaking on the stick when close to staling.

I can dive to 400+ knots and the stick is the same as if I was flying at 200 knots. Now generally force feedback effects on warbirds in DCS isn't that great. They have stall warning, movable stick with trimming (missing from corsair) abd on slight stiffening at high speed. I know with other force feedback sticks you can use their native app to force more powerful FFB effects. But DCS native warbirds FFB isn't great.

In several other ww2 sims the effects are much more noticeable. Diving past 500mph in a p51 will make you work to pull that stick back. You'll find if you're outrrimmed you'll have problems placing the gunsight on the enemy because the sticked has moved so much during trimming during violent manovours.