Schweiks Sim vs. Real Flying Debate Thread

[bobbysocks]

And speaking of engines, his drastic fuel consumption is most likely because he set the controls for max. power for takeoff and didn't adjust pitch/fuel accordingly once he was up, meaning those engines were seriously taxed.

that would be my bet. flying a plane with a variable pitch prop is more complicated than one with fixed pitch. now add in the fact it is a twin and you need to sync those. he probably had is mixture WAY off, engines running at different RPMs, his pitch set too coarse, etc,. there is a chance that the plane was flown in at the end of a trip or for mtc and not refueled yet. but even at that, there should have been enough fuel in the tanks for more than 10 minutes of flight. commercial airlines never run it that close. the only times I ever saw them draft fuel from a plane ( except for overweight ) was to fix a fuel tank or leak and when it came time for to weigh the plane to check loss to corrosion. those jet fighters were on scene pretty quick but this is scenario (highjack/ stolen plane for terroristic purposes ) is something DHS/FAA have plans for.

 

[GrauGeist]

Quoted from the traffic between the guy and ATC:

"I'm down to 2,100 (pounds)," he told the ATC. "I started at 30 something. … I don't know what the burnage is like on takeoff, but it burned quite a bit faster than I expected."

 

[soulezoo]

Like I mentioned earlier, any aircraft can do aerobatics at least once...much like any ship can be a submarine.

You mean like the B-52 over Fairchild a while back?

 

[XBe02Drvr]

flying a plane with a variable pitch prop is more complicated than one with fixed pitch. now add in the fact it is a twin and you need to sync those. he probably had is mixture WAY off, engines running at different RPMs, his pitch set too coarse, etc

Spoken like a true piston pounder! A turboprop is a whole different animal. There's no mixture control, just a fuel cutoff.(the fuel control does mixture). You don't adjust propeller pitch. (The prop governor does that. You just tell it what RPM you want, and it holds that through all power changes). The power levers control thrust. (both forward and reverse). Autosynch takes care of matching up RPMs as long as you set them reasonably close. Imagine driving a bus with an automatic transmission vs one with a 4 speed crashbox, a 2 speed axle, and no synchromesh.
Cheers,
Wes

 

[Clayton Magnet]

And the PW150's on a Q400 are FADEC. Just push the power levers forward and the computer controls everything. Kinda like a Fw-190

 

[bobbysocks]

Spoken like a true piston pounder!
Cheers,
Wes

That I are and probably will remain. Will never get the chance to mess with a TP unless I get in good with the puddle jumper jocks in Central America....

 

[GrauGeist]

You mean like the B-52 over Fairchild a while back?

Yeah - that was a quick and tragic end to an interesting career...

 

[BiffF15]

It was an ugly story ending with a completely unnecessary loss of life and aircraft.

Biff

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

It was an ugly story ending with a completely unnecessary loss of life and aircraft.

Biff

Then yesterday you had the pilot of a Cessna 525 jet fly his plane into his house in an attempt to kill his wife and her son. Hours prior he had been released from jail on bond after being charged with assaulting his wife. The wife and son were not harmed, but the pilot died. Crazy...

 

[XBe02Drvr]

Hours prior he had been released from jail on bond after being charged with assaulting his wife. The wife and son were not harmed, but the pilot died.

Maybe bail for violent crime charges should come with GPS ankle bracelet attached. OR...Maybe fewer guilty parties would be acquitted if they had to concoct their defense from a jail cell instead of from their lawyer's office.
OR...Maybe ALL male alleged perpetrators of domestic violence are too much of a risk to public safety to be on the street.
Just a thought (or three).
Wes

 

[GrauGeist]

It was an ugly story ending with a completely unnecessary loss of life and aircraft.

Biff

Agreed and Holland was known to be reckless on many occasions, hence the comment of an "interesting career".

Honestly, I don't understand why he was still a pilot after his track record...

 

[soulezoo]

Agreed and Holland was known to be reckless on many occasions, hence the comment of an "interesting career".

Honestly, I don't understand why he was still a pilot after his track record...

I think we can all agree there. But I have seen, and it's not a universal blanket statement to all and exceptions apply, where senior officers make some egregious missteps and it's all excused or covered up- Holland exhibit A. Some of those involving loss of life or class A mishaps. Almost like it's the proverbial club where once in, you're golden. Never understood the double standard from my perspective.

 

[soulezoo]

Sorry for the thread drift...

 

[Ivan1GFP]

The AI in Il2 is an order of magnitude better than in any Microsoft Simulators I ever played. I'm sure it's absolutely no comparison to the real thing (a real dogfight with real aircraft) but set at the highest level, it is certainly comparable to the best human opponents I played against in the game in the ten years or so that I played online.

The AI in Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator was basically worthless to my experience, and the flight models were so far off the mark as to be unrecognizable - and far too easy. You couldn't really go into a spin. In Il2, you will experience snap rolls, you do have to fight the torque on high-powered engines, you can ride the edge of a stall etc.



Actually in Il2, energy fighting and specifically energy fighting in groups is what the AI excels at. When flying the German planes it uses 'by the book' German WW2 tactics, at least up to a point. You will recognize tactics that you have read about I'll put it that way. It's in group combat that the AI is really better than against human opponents. In an extended one-on-one dogfight a good human pilot can indeed be more unpredictable. But you get a few pairs of Fw 190s or Bf 109s flown by the top rated AI, you are in trouble because they are excellent at blind-siding you, especially right when you are about to line up your shot on their wingman.

The biggest problem I had with the AI is that the 'friendly' AI seems to be pretty bad - the planes run into each other (especially in large formations) and you have to constantly nag your Wingman to stay with you and so on.



I think that is overstating the case a bit (good Allied pilots were not quite that rare, and even the top experten were getting shot down even in the early war years). But yes, you can set novices on either side. My point is that if you want to set it to what you think is realistic, you can very easily put the novices on the Allied side for an early war scenario.

So my point is that with Il2 you could easily setup a realistic war-time scenario in terms of pilot training. And you could even set one up that was exaggerated if you wanted to.

You can also of course control how many planes there are on both sides, the relative starting altitudes and which side starts with an advantage etc, in a matter of 1 or 2 minutes using the Quick Mission Builder. If you use the Full Mission Builder you can get much more elaborate. For the AI, pilot quality actually matters more than sheer numbers though.

S

Hello Schweik,

Been away from this forum for a while. Missed the goings on in this place but the subject seems to have wandered a bit.
When I typed my last post, I had forgotten that I actually had IL2 installed on an AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.33 GHz back when that machine was state-of-the-art. I am guessing this would have been around 2002 or 2003 or so. I played it for a while and didn't find it to be particularly hard to beat either. The old Athlon is still around but hasn't been powered up in a few years. IL2 is still installed.
I was cleaning around it a couple weeks ago and found a keyboard cheatsheet that I had printed which is what reminded me about this thread. There is also CFS, CFS2, and CFS3 all installed on the same machine if I remember right. (It actually runs Windows 98 SE).

The difference I suppose is that the CFS games with their open architecture kept my interest and even though IL2 had better graphics, it seemed way too limited. I am a lot more interested in learning about flight dynamics than in eye candy.

- Ivan.

 

[Schweik]

Hi Ivan,

I'm not sure what year that win 98 version was from but that is almost the exact opposite of the way I would describe Il2 and CFS1-3. To me CFS never even came remotely close to vaguely accurate in terms of flight models. It was always very cartoony and the aircraft were very easy to fly - difficult to stall let alone spin. Some of the American planes and popular fighters like the Fw 190 were very overmodeled "uber" planes. Damage models were cartoonish. Engine management was non-existent and online servers seemed to always be set to unlimited ammo and so forth. I always felt Microsoft Flight Sim in various incarnations was only useful for simulating navigation and little else.

I should be clear I am only familiar with the original version of the game in all it's incarnations through "IL2-Pacific Fighters / 1946" I only briefly experimented with Cliffs of Dover and have not played Battle of Stalingrad or Battle of Moscow which use a different, new game engine.

Like most computer games (the old) Il2 went through a very long evolution and again, I don't know at what stage you engaged with it. A lot of what happened with that game derived from many tens of thousands of iterations of interaction between the gamers who played it, who have very similar discussions in their forums to those you see here (in terms of historical research) and the game designers.There was a lot of tweaking and I think Ubisoft or whoever was in charge did a good job of sticking to historical sources as the basis for their FM's rather than just what the crowd wanted.

I would say however that the flight models in Il2 were far more accurate for the aircraft that the Russians were familiar with - basically anything that operated on the Russian Front, as opposed to the ones for the Pacific Theater and so on which were added later.

For aircraft such as the early to mid-war Bf 109E-G, Bf 110, Fw 190A, Ju 87, Ju 88, all the Russian fighters (LaGG 3, La-5, Yak series, Il2, Pe-2 etc.), the Italian planes which were used on the Russian Front (MC 200, 202, G.50) and many of the Anglo-American planes used by the Russians like the Hurricane, P-39, early model P-40s, Spit V and so on, the flight models seemed pretty accurate compared to all the books I had read. It was certainly not difficult to wreck one if you weren't paying attention.

I don't think their system - the old Il2, handled high altitude very well either incidentally. Anything above 15,000 feet starts to look weird.

S

 

[Ivan1GFP]

Hello Schweik,

There is a lot of validity in what you describe. I still play mostly with the original Combat Flight Simulator mainly because the flight modelling actually lacks very little in comparison to the later versions (in my opinion) and because visual modelling is a challenge. The STOCK flight models are simply junk as you described.... At least mot of them are. The stock Merlin powered Spitfire Mk.IX makes a pretty good approximation for a Griffon powered Mk.XIV and that is about it for accuracy. The stock P-51D is the "uber" plane; Its weight is about a ton and a half too low and performance is correspondingly high. The stock Me 109G goes about 100 MPH (480 MPH) faster than it should. The stock FW 190A is actually one of the UNDER modeled aeroplanes of the bunch. With a maximum Coefficient of Lift of around 1.2, it has trouble staying out of its own way and is a barely flyable brick.
The designers really didn't know how use the features that were available in the actual game engine and it shows.

The redeeming factor of all this is that it is an open architecture and there are ways to get things done if one knows what the target performance and handling of an aeroplane should be. A lot of the decoding of the parameters in the flight models was done long before I got into the game (with a few errors just to make things interesting) and even *I* have managed to figure a few things out on my own over the years.

You are also correct in commenting about the damage model but at least the relative damage of weapons can be corrected.
There are few things that are still bothersome and very hard to work around.
The game still only handles single speed superchargers and AI gunnery is way too accurate.

Regarding forums, the IL2 forum are much superior. I think most of the CFS gamers died long ago.
While a lot of good information is presented there (I end up there sometimes when I am looking for some specific information), I don't believe there is much you can do to alter the aircraft yourself and for me that is the most interesting part of playing with simulators.
Of course with this flexibility comes the ability to do some really stupid things: A couple days ago, I accidentally goofed up a parameter I was adjusting and had my Airacobra doing spins and gaining altitude while spinning! In addition, it was going slightly over 2000 knots while doing this!
It wasn't hard to figure out where I goofed up so it was pretty easy to correct.

Another "problem" at the time was that I didn't have that much interest in aerial combat on the Eastern Front. Even today I don't have a great deal of interest there though I do understand the IL2 world is much expanded. It is probably the better game if you don't have an inclination to mess around with flight models on your own because the modelling there is very good if not excellent. I prefer to have the basic framework to be able to see how things interact.

- Ivan.

 

[Schweik]

Hi Ivan,

Well that totally makes sense, I'm sure playing around with / editing the flight models is fun and interesting.

One thing about Il2 worth noting, while indeed I think the Russian front planes are the best modeled, they do have many others and generally I think the earlier war planes aren't bad - the A6M2 and F4F for example.

Also, many of the planes on the Russian Front also fought in other Theaters, for example Me 109E, F and G, Fw 190A, MC 202, Ju -87 and 88, He 111, Spitfire Mk V, Hurricanes, Tomahawks, Kittyhawks and P-39s, A-20's and B-25s also fought in places like North Africa, Italy or Malta. or over the British isles though sadly they don't have a Spitfire Mk 1.

I gather there has been some modding done to the old version of Il2 as well though I don't know anything about it. The only thing I have ever modded was skins, mostly because I am too lazy to get into the guts of it all.

Finally while I too did not always have sufficient hardware to play with the leading edge graphics, the original Il2 is now within the capabilities of most mid-range computers, so long as you have a graphics card, and it's cheap - you can get it on Steam for $10 I think.

S

 

[Zipper730]

All the G suits in the world aren't going to help you with that problem, only a strong diaphragm and peak physical condition! G suits are an antidote for positive Gs, but not much help with negative.

Like blowing out a little when you hit the dip in the roller-coaster, or actually sucking air into your diaphragm like you're going to lay down the most spectacular belch in human history

He probably knew exactly as much about the "Q" as he could glean from various flight sim computer games.

Some kind of access system?

Betcha this will result in universal retrofitting of ID card access in all air carrier aircraft not already so equipped. I remember when my friend Kathleen wanted to show me the glass cockpit FMS system in an Eagle EMB-145, she had to call Dispatch and get them to remotely tell the plane's ACARS system that she was authorized at that time before it would let her power up the master switch.

So I guess airplanes do indeed have keys these days

I bet there'll also be a push to reduce the authenticity of computer flight sims.

I hope not, that would be a real shame -- one dickhead does something completely nuts and everybody else has to pay for it...

Yeah - that was a quick and tragic end to an interesting career...

I'm amazed Colonel Holland didn't get bounced out on his ass.

 

[Schweik]

Apparently there was another attempt to steal a plane but they stopped the guy...