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CFS3 airplane rocket assisted take off / engine thrust

BorekS

BorekS

Members +
having a new question.

well, there is a few aiprlanes which would be nice to enhance with a rocket engine take-off boost feature.
eg. the Arado 234 with rocked pods, Lippisch P.13 starter engine and many many more...

as most of you already know some things cant be simply simulated with CFS3....

I am thinking a base initial stage we would just need at least, is an event where any of two (and more) engined airplane would be able to stop working one of them. lets say a single jet engined airplane is set at aircraft.cfg as two engined infact. I just need the second engine let burnout sooner. that would solve a lot.

anybody tried?
 

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The motors don't actually work in that version either, it just has a stupid amount of WEP power to simulate rocket thrust. But I may have an idea... watch this space.

EDIT - The idea works. Sort of. Using aircraft X the speed at the end of the runway was around 235 mph from a standing start, when the same aircraft was equipped with a "rocket pack" the speed increased to nearly 270 mph.

The trick is as simple as giving the "rocket pack" a negative drag value, in my case I used -10. The "boost" stops as soon as the pack is dropped and it has no effect on anything else, no need to tinker with engine settings. As a downside it really only affects moderately high speeds as at low speeds drag isn't an issue but it may be a start for someone else's train of thought.
 
thank you guys for the hints and tips!

@Daiwilletti: I am bit familliar with the downloadable RATOs for FirePower Ar 234 or the Ju-88. still I didnt tried it to be honest, because the regular installation seemed to me bit overcomplicated, also it seemed to me its not exactly what I am looking for ;)

@greycap.raf: yum, that sounds interesting ;) I am not good when it goes about weapon physical model, could you share some demo sample, please?

so, there is no way to let, lets the second engine fuel consumption or thrust / power to make actig them different? just curious - if any CFS3 two engined aircaft starts, there is a engine startup sequency (timer). dunno which from settings this comes, but if the engines can start with a delay between the firts and second one, why they couldnt stop working similar way?
 
engine start

You can manually start the engines. This way you can start the engines you want and when you want. So for a twin with RATO say the two piston engines are started and the RATO (both) are modeled as a single engine with exhausts positioned appropriately. Now how to get these to work, well just make the third engine another prop with the RATO effect (for piston engines and jets just another jet engine). Design it with enough thrust to model the boost you need and when you take off just kill the engine and drop the RATO pods, simple. So what you are doing is just adding additional engines, seems that it should work. Have fun. Maybe Daniel could write a script with a hotkey to activate and disable the third engine...just saying :encouragement:
 
yes, adding the RATO related additional engine is what I meant... I see, a manual controll, how simple! thanks for tip ;)

I just wasnt sure and I still I am not sure if the engines may got its own (different) properities or not. I am not good when it goes about aircraft / weapon physics and all what I can recognise at the aircraft.cfg file is all the engine related properities doesnt take care which for engine it is. they are just global settings. the only thing which tells to the game how many engines therer is there and its position is the [GeneralEngineData] item, right?

I also never bothered with .air file editation, if this can be set for CFS3 somehow there...

 
adding engines

This will not be a simple task unfortunately. :dizzy: Many parameters will need to be considered and adding boost to takeoff while not effecting top speed and climb rate will be complex and challenging to do, if at all possible. It would be trial and error for sure. First you would need to test if turning off one engine while in flight makes a difference in performance, if so you could then adjust the flight model to achieve the top speed you want with only two engines, should be feasible ... well maybe.

I would model the flight model to achieve the two engine performance you want and then add a third engine (would need to be the same parameters as cfs3 only allows for one set of parameters for all engines). So adding an additional engine with the same hp etc would change the potential top speed and climb which is good just how much is the unknown.

Sounds like a good problem to work out - :banghead:
 
NachtPiloten said:
cfs3 only allows for one set of parameters for all engines
Click to expand...

ah, that I was affraid of.
in another words if I would add a third "boost" engine for a two engined airplane, when such third engine would be off, the airplane would be basically 1/3 less power in a while... bit better it would be for a four engined airplane + fifth boost engine, if I am getting it right :)

... however, some kind of trial-error work could get some usable flight model maybe.
 
Yes, you can have up to four engines, but all have the same performance. So you can have up to twice the power. It wouldn't be very hard to write an autohotkey script that would shut off the extra two engines after the appropriate amount of time has passed, and effects could be easily attached to the extra engines. The drawback is the performance may not quite work out. Rene's idea is also possible, and effects and an autohotkey script can be added as well, it is a little less straight-forward, but definitely workable. The anti-drag method has it's own drawback in performance (power increase is exponential vs. airspeed rather than linear), but could possibly tuned more precisely than just having 150% or 200% power options with the engine method. I did try the anti-drag method before, but I couldn't get it quite right and it produced some odd results. I still think with the right settings it could work.
 
gecko said:
Yes, you can have up to four engines, but all have the same performance. So you can have up to twice the power. It wouldn't be very hard to write an autohotkey script that would shut off the extra two engines after the appropriate amount of time has passed, and effects could be easily attached to the extra engines. The drawback is the performance may not quite work out. Rene's idea is also possible, and effects and an autohotkey script can be added as well, it is a little less straight-forward, but definitely workable. The anti-drag method has it's own drawback in performance (power increase is exponential vs. airspeed rather than linear), but could possibly tuned more precisely than just having 150% or 200% power options with the engine method. I did try the anti-drag method before, but I couldn't get it quite right and it produced some odd results. I still think with the right settings it could work.
Click to expand...


Good make me one for the HE 177, please. The way I modeled that plane was to give it four engines with only two props and such being displayed. This must be done in the mesh too or cfs3 gets peeved. it would be nice to have a hotkey to shut down two engines in the HE 177 as these babies had clutches that would allow you to disengage engines from the props for all types of reasons.....it would be nice since that HE 177 is one too cool of a ride, just saying! :wavey:

So getting back to the problem at hand, take the 234, model 4 engines two seen and two hidden. Create the fm with the four engines (we have the 234C I believe that had 4 engines so data maybe available... Once you do this fly her around and see if you get the boost you want and if so, learn how to cut the two engines you don't want to use and see what happens. Horrido!
 
NachtPiloten said:
Good make me one for the HE 177, please. The way I modeled that plane was to give it four engines with only two props and such being displayed. This must be done in the mesh too or cfs3 gets peeved. it would be nice to have a hotkey to shut down two engines in the HE 177 as these babies had clutches that would allow you to disengage engines from the props for all types of reasons.....it would be nice since that HE 177 is one too cool of a ride, just saying! :wavey:

So getting back to the problem at hand, take the 234, model 4 engines two seen and two hidden. Create the fm with the four engines (we have the 234C I believe that had 4 engines so data maybe available... Once you do this fly her around and see if you get the boost you want and if so, learn how to cut the two engines you don't want to use and see what happens. Horrido!
Click to expand...

That´s precisely what i do when i fly the Heinkel. Buy the way i really enjoy your work with the night fighters. Incredible job i spent countless hours flying night missions thanks to you.
 
I can add it to my list Ted, do you have any documentation on how the system worked? Can't guarantee anything will work, but I can look at it. I'll try to see if I can get a rocket assist script working too.
 
He177

There was a clutch which allowed the pilot to select the engine(s) to power the prop. So all I really need is a script to turn off two of the engines. Now we can do this using the manual engine start/stop features but pressing a hot key to kill and then of course restart the selected engines would be easier. Let me look at the mesh to see which of the four engines were the "invisible" ones that I had to model for the flightmodel to work.
 
Hotkeys are still limited to commands cfs3 already recognizes, their main value is in the ability to have a single hot key initiate a series of commands in cfs3 that might have been controlled by a single lever or button in the real aircraft.

In in the case of the rocket assist, after starting the main engines, the engines functioning as rockets could be started, powered up to 100%, and then shut down to simulate burn out after a set period of time all with a single key press. The cfs3 commands for the necessary engine controls would have to be configured to match what key presses the script is sending out.

In the case of the engine clutches for the 177, I'm not sure if a script offers much advantage, as mixture idle cutoff and start commands are already about as simple as it gets. There also isn't an instant restart option if the engine is off long enough to stop turning. Or am I understanding it wrong and there is more to the clutch than start and stop?
 
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