Wasnt my cup of tea till i strapped her on either.. Right now, i'm not trying to sell Bills work or my own here. I'm just an observer flying a plane i never flew before.. I can only liken her to a young Lady. A bit of a precocious and quite charming lady. She lifts off at a little over 45 mph, and will gently dance for you across whatever sky you want to fly in. She isnt high or fast. She wants to be seen and she'll hug tree top to 5000 feet like a fish in water.. She does NOT like to land.. Thats where she gets precocious. She'll wiggle and wobble and sometimes downright refuse to land. She likes to fly. She likes to dance. To that degree, I'm keeping the flight model dead on target.
Where i am NOT going to keep the FM on target is on ground handling. The only version of this aircraft made, was the prototype, and it had a problem with the pants catching on the ground all the time, making ground handling a royal pain in the rear. In FSX that means the plane crashes and you restart the flight. I wont do that. i wont make it that way. It'll handle pleasantly on the ground.. ground steering is going to be a composite. The original plane has a fixed tailwheel. No description is given as to exactly what is meant by that, but it was non steerable. Our tailwheel will be a combination of steerable and free turning, like we I did for the P-36. It'll steer up to some as yet unknown degree of angle, and past that, it will function like a free turning caster. Thats because a LOT of us just aint never gonna get the hang of steering a taildragger down, and frankly, i want everyone to be able to enjoy this plane. its worth the small sacrifice.
I have to rework some of the engine parameters. I started with putting the original 125 hp Scarab in it, but it turns out it has a 165 hp Scarab now. Oddly, the performance with the higher powered engine is a little less even though they have identical numbers in most other places.. I'll give you exact numbers across the board.
I'm also going to length to make certain that the pilots view point is as close to possible the actual view point and angle of view that the pilot of the real plane has. I dont know about anyone else, but i'm six feet tall and am a bit sick of planes that put a panel directly in front of you so that you have to scootch up just to see over the dashboard.. i dont know what i can do about the field of view, but i'm gonna do my best to make it realistic to a human field of view.
Will keep you all updated
.. time to go dive into my morning coffee and get some of the fuzzies outta my brain..
Pam
The engine detail looks excellent and those Art-Deco wheel farings 
