Conspicuous by Their Absence

A lot of projects I have are logical progressions and regressions of a subject. For example, I started a Fairey Battle, once the main construction was done I duplicated the file a couple of times to build a Fairey Battle pilot trainer, a Fairey Battle gunnery trainer and finally a Fairey Battle engine test bed (Bristol Hercules). The last one taught me more on merging large radial engines into slim fuselages than any other project. All four are very different aircraft that thankfully have a common parent.
The secret is to plan ahead and only build the major assemblies and components once and then to alter to a specific model once as well.
There are many aircraft out there that lend themselves to this method.
Westland Whirlwind [S55] (piston to turbine).
Westland Wessex [S58] (piston to turbine)
Spitfire (short nose to long nose to early griffon)
Mustang (B/C to D to F82 to Cavalier Mustang[RR Dart])
Halifax (I and II to III etc)
Lancaster (I and III to II to Lancastrian to York)
He111 (B/C to P to H to Z)
Gloster Meteor (I to III to F4 to F8 to T7 to AW NF11 to AW NF14 to U10)
Vickers Wellington (I to II to III et al)
Hinaidi to Hyderabad, Vildebeeste to Vincent and more and more.
All of these are natural progressions made by the manufacturers, after all designing an aircraft was a difficult and costly business, wouldn't it be logical to use items already at your fingertips to further the company's products.
This proves that the list of available aircraft we have access to is but a tiny slice of what we would like and ultimatly the raison-d'etre of this thread.
 
Hello Womble55,

I very seldom consider multiple aircraft resulting from a single project. If something works out easily from a prior project than it is just luck and doing the basic design on the "least commitment" principle.

The only aircraft I have done that were intended to result in multiple aircraft was the P-47 Thunderbolts and perhaps the F4F Wildcats. The rest were just targets of opportunit but there were a bunch of those.

Other projects that have been reworked to multiple aircraft that I have done are (from memory):

P-40E ---> P-40C & maybe a P-36 eventually.
La-5FN ---> La-7
F4U-1A ---> F4U-1 Birdcage & F4U-2N Night Fighter
A6M5 Model 52a ---> A6M3 Model 22 & A6M2 Model 21
F6F-3 --> F6F-5 (This one was much tougher than it looked.)
Macchi 205 ---> Macchi 202 (Whenever it gets released.)
F4F-3 ---> F4F-4

The Wildcats are very little more than a repaint with new AIR and DP files. The canopy frame modification barely counts.

- Ivan.
 
Macchi Flight Performance

Today (after the end of the Mayan World), I spent a fair amount of time working on a flight model for the Folgore. Since we are still alive, it seems worthwhile to try to finish this project.

I just about always start with a stock P-51D AIR file. Besides changing all the obvious stuff, one should always take out the silly stuff from the P-51D. The thing that got me today was that the Folgore with only about 1100 HP could sustain a turn at about 2000 feet altitude at 155 knots while pulling about 2.3 G. The aeroplane simply does not have the engine power to sustain a turn like this.

Turns out the wing efficiency factor is way too low (Bleeds off too little speed), so I need to make a couple adjustments and test again because all the level speeds will likely be a bit off from what I currently have. On a good note, the engine power should not change. I already swapped the propeller for one from a stock Me 109G.

- Ivan.
 
When starting with the stock P-51D AIR file, there are quite a few areas that need fixed even before putting in any aircraft specific information. The Wing efficiency at 4330 is much better (lower is better) than any of the other stock aircraft.

These are the values to be found in the stock aircraft:
P-51D....................4330
P-47D....................6856
Spitfire I................5724
Spitfire IX..............5724
Hurricane I.............5179
Bf 109E..................5212
Bf 109G..................5212
FW 190A................5759


The Coefficient of Lift graph (Record 404) is also a bit strange in that the CL doesn't significantly drop past the stall. See attached image for the graph plotted in a spreadsheet. Up to 15 degrees, this graph looks OK, but beyond that, the CL should drop VERY quickly.

- Ivan.
 
After correcting the wing efficiency to 5320 (pretty much a guess), and correcting the CL graph (which didn't affect straight line performance), the level speed of the C.202 dropped by about 2 mph which isn't significant.

Sea level (500 ft altitude) maximum speed is 309 mph on 1086 HP.
Speed at 15,000 ft is 372 mph on 1208 HP.
Speed at 17,500 ft is 371 mph on 1106 HP.

Actual maximum speed should be 373 mph at 18,500 ft, so these numbers are fairly close.

- Ivan.
 
Happy New Year - 2013 Anno Domini

Wish you all a Happy New Year!

11:53 PM EST.
:pop4:

Signing out for the Year.
- Ivan.
 
Ivan said:
That last screenshot was a cheat. I just took the screenshot and adjusted it using GIMP until it looked like I believe that it should. There were no textures that looked actually make a model look that way in the simulator.

I then took the modified screenshot and did pretty much what Hubbabubba just described and checked a couple places. The shaded areas were simply too dark. The optimal place to sample appeared to be the upper surface of the wing or stabiliser. I then took the RGB values from those places and did a Eyeball average to get value to use for texturing.

Attached is a screenshot showing the new texture in use. I may yet modify it but it looks good enough to me.

- Ivan.
Click to expand...

Here is a video of a reproduction Zero. It seems like we are pretty much in agreement
or perhaps their colour is even darker.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=fvwp&v=To5T3WI7pHg&NR=1

- Ivan.
 
with the current move of my aac friends
from the eto to the pacific theater of operations,
my interest has shifted (slightly) to japanese aircraft.

after spending a good portion of today searching,
i found no nates, kates, bettys, or even a val.
i did find a few zeros, oscars and a some others,
but all in all, the pickings were very slim.
and i haven't had the time to check out
the quality of those found.
as most are older models,
i don't have a lot of hope in that department.

surely, nothing to compare with that beauty above.
any release time frame estimate?
i have no doubt the aac boys would love
to put your wildcat and zero
against each other in a few missions.
 
Japanese Aircraft

I have the following installed on my machine:

Ki-27 Nate
D3A Val
G4M Betty
B5N Kate

And a bunch more Japanese Stuff.
Email me your list and I will see what I have that is packageable.

ETA on A6M2 Model 21? I have no idea. The outter visual model is done.
From what I can tell, there simply does not exist a good J2M Raiden though.

- Ivan.
 
Ivan said:
I have the following installed on my machine:

Ki-27 Nate
D3A Val
G4M Betty
B5N Kate

And a bunch more Japanese Stuff.
Email me your list and I will see what I have that is packageable.

ETA on A6M2 Model 21? I have no idea. The outter visual model is done.
From what I can tell, there simply does not exist a good J2M Raiden though.

- Ivan.
Click to expand...



Way to go Ivan, I'm sure Shigeru Tanaka will now have one of his famous wobblies now that you've derided his J2M..............Only joking....aren't I?
 
womble55 said:
Way to go Ivan, I'm sure Shigeru Tanaka will now have one of his famous wobblies now that you've derided his J2M..............Only joking....aren't I?
Click to expand...

Does wobblies mean rants? I have my opinions there, but not based on any personal interactions.

This thread was never intended to get personal, I just commented that I have never seen even a moderately good J2M Raiden. If I remember correctly, the ST Raiden was about 2/3 sized or something similar, so a simple scaling factor would not fix it.

I mentioned earlier that the A6M2 visual model was done, but I lied. I just finished a minor but rather involved fix.

- Ivan.
 
Ivan said:
Does wobblies mean rants? I have my opinions there, but not based on any personal interactions.

This thread was never intended to get personal, I just commented that I have never seen even a moderately good J2M Raiden. If I remember correctly, the ST Raiden was about 2/3 sized or something similar, so a simple scaling factor would not fix it.

I mentioned earlier that the A6M2 visual model was done, but I lied. I just finished a minor but rather involved fix.

- Ivan.
Click to expand...

No I was joking although even though his work was fairly good several years ago, he will, sadly, be remembered for his odd shaped aircraft and his famous rantings and ravings when somebody tried to do repaints on his aircraft. If I start ranting and raving please put me in a home. The problem with this game is that we stretch the boundries of accuracy and quality only for it to become the norm, thus we have to go one better the next time. I see this every day when I open old projects and wonder how I could have made something so basic and subsequently have to rebuild said project.
 
womble55 said:
No I was joking although even though his work was fairly good several years ago, he will, sadly, be remembered for his odd shaped aircraft and his famous rantings and ravings when somebody tried to do repaints on his aircraft. If I start ranting and raving please put me in a home. The problem with this game is that we stretch the boundries of accuracy and quality only for it to become the norm, thus we have to go one better the next time. I see this every day when I open old projects and wonder how I could have made something so basic and subsequently have to rebuild said project.
Click to expand...

Hello Womble55,
I downloaded a few of his aircraft. I don't think that any are currently enabled except for the ST Raiden because I revisited it recently. M

y opinion (and this is dangerous to state) was that he put very attractive camouflage schemes on his planes, but that the models themselves were a bit on the primitive side. He also tended to run a LOT of different camo schemes on each basic visual model he built. I think the Raiden was probably the WORST of any of his work because of the strange size he chose. Also, the shapes for just about all his planes were sort of eyeball accurate as opposed to tech drawing or photo accurate.

I don't know that I have done any better. Up until my P-40E project, all my aeroplanes were pretty much eyeball accurate as well. Right now with the A6M2 Model 21 project, I am running into exactly the situation you described. The current A6M2 is based on the A6M5 that I built somewhere around 11 years ago. It has been improved a bit here and there, but it still has goofy stuff from much earlier. One of these goofies, the inner landing gear doors, caused me some serious grief a few days ago when I found that correcting the shape of the polygon pushed it off the edge of the texture. Hard part was that I found this out AFTER doing a lot of SCASM edits.

I now have good dimensional drawings of the A6M Zero in a few different models but am not about to go back to correct things unless I need to. I also have a P-51A that is so far off of current standards that I am probably going to do its replacement as a completely new project.

- Ivan.
 
I've been there, done that and I got a T-shirt. Its amazing, what we thought was very very good a couple of years ago, is now barely acceptable. I wish I had a pound (£) for every time I've rebuilt parts to improve and update.
My Manchester had three or maybe four fuselages, two tailplanes, three cockpits, two or three vultures. My Whitley was a total rebuild, everything was redone.
My Shorts 184 was the exception to the rule, no complex features to worry about.....bliss!
 
Hello Womble55,

I have one of those really simple projects also: The Fokker E.III Eindecker. The shapes are so simple that there aren't going to be a whole lot of fixes. The cockpit POV is outside the visual model, so display order is somewhat unimportant. These days, I fix only what I find is objectionable in an older model. In the case of the A6M2 I am currently working on, the CoG is a bit too high which causes some interesting side effects in the flight model, but I didn't fix it because of all the cascading changes that would involve. Hopefully that won't cause problems down the road because there will be about 4 or 5 aircraft based on this A6M5 / A6M2 design.

In the case of the Corsair I built even further back than the Zero, I first thought the shapes were incorrect. The plane looked a bit too fat, but in checking dimensional drawings, I found that the width was pretty much spot on. The CoG was mislocated though. (I had a tendency years ago to put the vertical CoG in line with the centerline of the engine which puts the thrust line in line with the aircraft CoG which loses a small pitching moment from a higher thrust line. This also puts the CoG a bit high relative to the landing gear so that a noseover is more likely with harsh application of brakes.) The effects on the Corsair were much worse than the Zero so I actually wrote a program that moves all the textures after I move the parts. Now I have a prototype Corsair which I call the F4U-1D which is hovering about 6 inches over the runway because the AIR file hasn't been updated to compensate.

I was checking out your Manchester last night. You did a pretty good job with shapes and such. I did find one odd thing though: Your cockpit POV seems to be well in front of the nose of your aircraft. Was that intentional?

- Ivan.
 
Ivan;780951 I was checking out your Manchester last night. You did a pretty good job with shapes and such. I did find one odd thing though: Your cockpit POV seems to be well in front of the nose of your aircraft. Was that intentional? - Ivan.[/QUOTE said:
When I was building the Manchester, the grand total of parts was creeping up far too quick. I know that AF99 will handle 1200 parts but I try and keep the part count as low as possible hence the solid cockpit canopy and the non component fins and rudders. The flight characteristics were quite good, in keeping with the excellent handling associated with Roy Chadwicks offspring. I personaly, never fly using the virtual cockpit as I rely heavily on instruments so the positioning of the POV was not a priority.

Regarding the CoG position, I was always taught that the preferred position was between 25% and 33% from the leading edge of a straight wing, getting more complicated on wings with tapers (use the average chord measurements) and mega difficult on sweepbacks. I really must dig out my RC design book and find the formula to calculate the different types of wing. I quite regularly forget to position the CoG before producing for flight and end up with flight characteristics that are interesting to say the least.
Click to expand...
 
Regarding the Manchester's cockpit POV, it is a rather simple fix. In my opinion, with a solid cockpit, just put the POV just in front of the windscreen and views should be pretty much the same as if it were inside the cockpit.

I made the same design choices with my B-25C Mitchell, though the biggest difference is that yours is released and I am still playing with my aeroplane. My B-25 also has 2D Fins / Rudders. I believe that pretty much optimal AF99 projects should run about 1100 Parts with 29 or 30 Components. More than that and you stand a very good chance of a project not building correctly even though you are still under the limits.

I believe you are correct regarding properly located CoGs. I generally set the CoG slightly further back at around 33% to 50% chord (more like 50%) because it seems much easier to cause a noseover in CFS than in real life. This might be because brakes in this game are either full on or full off.

I am not sure what you mean about producing for flight and causing problems. It seems like you pretty much have to have the issue resolved quite early. I was describing the visual model for 50% MAC but all that really should change in the AIR file is the landing gear contact and scrape points, neither of which should really affect handling in the air.

Either way, the Manchester was a good subject to model. FWIW, I just came upon some information regarding the Vulture engines and their reduction gear ratios on another forum.

- Ivan.
 
Yes the Rolls Royce Vulture was an amazing piece of kit, did you know that Luftwaffe night fighters could identify a Manchester by the shower of sparks that the Vulture would emit. There were many periods when the whole fleet of Manchesters were grounded due to mods or servicing requirements (reading between the lines....desperation). Also there was a major problem with the hydraulic systems on the Manchesters, leaks faulty piping and the worst was the possibilty of the propeller pitch being altered to a negative angle....guaranteed to fill your pants should that happen. Many Manchesters were lost this way. The profile publications booklet is an essential read.

One of the reasons why the Lancaster was so reliable was that the major problems had already been ironed out and once the Merlins (or Bristol Hercules) replaced the Vultures they were on to a sure thing.
 
I just finished flipping through Profile 260 about the Manchester. This and the Lancaster really were not very pretty aircraft.
The interesting bit of trivia I found in a forum message was for the Manchester's Vulture reduction gear ration - 2.38:1.
It sounds like the Vulture has reversible pitch propellers. Runaway propellers were actually a fairly common problem on some aircraft such as the B-26, but the propellers were not reversible.

- Ivan.
 
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