posted 01-19- 02:24 AM               

Ran the AI thru the easy test with several single engine planes and notice 3 common problems. These were with skill level set midway in the Mission Builder. Patch 1.5 installed.

1. The AI doesn't deal well with heavy torque. The more torquie (is that even a word?) the bigger the problem, on the Corsair the AI drags the left wing tip on the ground every time (with no wind).

Planes with less torque effect don't suffer from this. In fact they lift off the ground rather pretty.

2. The AI lets the tail lift way to early on tail draggers. This makes the aircraft take way too long to gain speed. On the Apache and the Hurricane with only guns for the loadout, the AI takes off long after the runway has run out. This is also related to #3.

3. The AI always uses flaps on takeoff. For some of the "Hot Rods", this makes ground handling with no rockets/bombs a bit tricky, even for a human pilot. This causes some of the ground handling errors because I can duplicate them when I take off the same way.
Also, the flaps cause extra drag when the tail is lifted too early and can make the plane take much longer to get airborne instead of taking less time. This seemed backwards to me until I was looking through an excerpt from a P-51 flight manual that basically said the same thing. The book even mentions that on a Mustang with no external stores, the flaps should only be used when landing.

Don't know if can be fixed unless the source code is released, but you may want to let the company doing the Mac port know of some updates they can do to the AI.

posted 01-19- 03:06 PM               

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Originally posted by Da Jug head:
1. The AI doesn't deal well with heavy torque. The more torquie (is that even a word?) the bigger the problem, on the Corsair the AI drags the left wing tip on the ground every time (with no wind).

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Heck, I can't get off the ground in a lot of these planes. They keep swinging real hard to the left. What's causing this effect anyway, and why is it so strong? I know of swing effects caused by gyro precession when the tail lifts, but what could cause this?

Don't say "torque". That doesn't swing you to the left.

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2. The AI lets the tail lift way to early on tail draggers. This makes the aircraft take way too long to gain speed.

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*blink* Ummm, raising the tail will increase acceleration. Or should anyway. Oh wait...

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Also, the flaps cause extra drag when the tail is lifted too early

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Ahhh. Did they give a reason for the interaction? I can't see why that smallish angle would make much of a difference, notably when you consider this makes the flaps more vertical to the airflow.

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thing. The book even mentions that on a Mustang with no external stores, the flaps should only be used when landing.

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That's true of everything I've flown. The only time you want flaps is when you want to reduce the weight on the gear - like on a soft field takeoff or in a heavy.

posted 01-19- 03:41 PM               

If you fail to put the flaps in the proper position, I promise you, you are in for a world of hurt....

posted 01-20- 04:19 AM               

These planes have a NASTY habit of pulling to the left, and did in real life. Heck, on a copy of a WWII training video for the P-51B, they have to set the rudder trim and aileron trim to take this into account before taking off, and the pilot still had to apply some corrective rudder.

If you let the tail wheel come off the ground too soon, there isn't enough speed for the rudder to counter the effect. You need the wheel on the ground until you have enough speed to control the direction using the rudder, but watch out on the Corsair, it has a HUGE rudder surface.

Flaps add to the problem too. I think it may be because they blank the elevators enough to keep the tail wheel from making good contact with the runway, but I wouldn't be willing to place any money on that as the reason.

The extra weight of external stores helps to reduce this effect and keep her on a more even keel when flaps are deployed.

Last, you really need steering tied to rudder control for some of these beasties since you can't use differential braking.

Also, I tried taking off in these planes without seperate rudder control and did exactly what you're talking about 99% of the time.

Nat-
Actually, at least for me, I'd rather you didn't try to offset the torque. The corsair had sooo much torque it was known to be a handful, but rolling/ turning with the torque effect can give you an edge when you're in a pickle