Concerning the stability, I understand that the plane can keep its backward position for a while. I was just wondering if it was really able to maintain such a fast backward flight as can be seen in one of your sequences.
During slow manoevers, no problems, but when the plane is going fast, I would imagine that the aerodynamics would become problematic...
Truth told, We arent moving very fast in any of those maneuvers. Each maneuver is entered into at between 250 - 450 km/h and during the maneuver, the air speed usually drops to zero and comes back up to 150 km/h on exit. This is still below stall speed however. Thats why you'll see me freaquently kick in the afterburners when exiting a stunt. I need to get the airspeed back up before i pancake.
This plane has a lower hard deck of 2500 feet and an upper hard deck at 4500 feet where its safe to begin maneuvers. Yevgeny Frolov, the pilot of the SU-37 made the statement that the plane could recover from a stall at 100 feet. Our plane, in its current service configuration of fuel and such cannot do this, While its moving, you can do almost anything you wish but once the airspeed gets too low, your going down like a homesick rock, so, by the time you reach 2500 feet, you need to be getting plenty of air over those wings, or punch out.
High speed thrust vectoring does little more than tighten the turns. The plane simply will not enter into an extreme maneuver as there is too much momentum for the thrust to overcome. At its very best, at higher speeds above 550 km/h the plane ( as big as it is ) handles a little like an F-16.
Yaw/flat rotations are possible ar 0 km/h through perhaps 125 km/h, but equilibrium takes over after that and the plane loses its balance, becoming uncontrollable.
The real plane is able to do a tvc turn where it rolls up on its wing and kicks in the tvc to rotate around and lower the turn radius to almost nothing. Our model can only approximate this at this time due in part to temporary limitations set by the fsx engine. Its the equilibrium issue thats causing the problem here. The truth is, the flight model can be set up to completely overcome the equilibrium issues, however, what you end up with is a 40000 pound metal cloud thats almost completely uncontrollable without the computer making adjustments in the controls as well as the tvc to keep it somewhat on a normal flight path. In the model, pilots could use differential thrust as well as rudder to maintain a correct flight path, but we decided that perhaps people thought this was too much work to do for an fsx model. So we tightened it up. differential thrust is still used in some flat rotations and other maneuvers, but its nit required to resume a straight flight path, and thats where the equilibrium problem raises its head. Restricted in its ability to float freely in any direction, and asked to do three things at once, the plane will lose its balance and tumbles out of control. I suspect that most likely the main problem is in my pilotage of it. I've flown a great many planes over the years and one or two real ones as well, but this thing is unlike anything i've ever seen before and i'm finding a major learning curve with it..
