Be sure.

Excellent summary. All I need is to print it up and tape it to the monitor and I won't have to see your pretty mugs anymore ;) :D Ahh... but that would be sanity, right? *sigh*

Am I missing something? Has there actually been any update since May?
Excuse my ignorance...but I just don't see it.

Several times. Just that there isn't much to tell as it's a matter of testing right now. Testing is one of those boring but necessary things.

Totally random question ....

Is there any chance that Gibbages Catalina will ever be flyable ?

I had the impression he was 90% there with cockpit and internals way back when -- then it all stopped.

I think is about the compagny wont let her plane for free.. somethink like that not sure

I recall Gibbage saying that the Catalina will never be flyable in Il-2's standards (let alone SoW) due to the complexity of the cockpits. However, I also recall him later saying that it was a possibility.

I think it may indeed be very hard to reach Oleg's standards and we may have to rely upon mods to explore this one (including in SoW where it may be possible to produce sub-standard mods).

Catalina was Consolidated.
Or did they were owned by NG or else?

Consolidated were bought out by McDonnell Douglas who asset stripped the company and closed down operations two years later.

Presumably IP rights for the PBY now rest with McDonnell Douglas.

I've flown a very well done Catalina add-on on a friend's FSX installation for many hours. In fact, we once played pilot and co-pilot on a 10 hour flight spread across three evenings, taking turns on the controls over the course of it. It's also among the top three aircraft i choose to fly whenever i visit him and we happen to fire up FSX.

As for the complexity of controls, it's true that the IL-2 way of modelling engine parameters is inadequate to convey how restricting the Cat was. FSX is inadequate in the FM department in some regimes, as well as in simulating floatplanes on the water properly, but since the Catalina has no flaps and no water rudders the developers of that add-on used "invisible" flaps, spoilers, airbrakes and water rudders working against the virtual pilot in order to tune the flight model to the proper difficulty.

I like that bird a lot, but i doubt most people would like flying it in IL-2 if it was done realistically. You need to change your carb heat settings almost every time you change altitude or throttle settings, the engines are operated under some strict limits and it's got so much drag that it's dead slow. No matter what combination of power and cowl flap settings you use, you can't go faster than 110-120 knots IAS without overheating badly. The usual cruising speed is a mere 100 knots, or 180km/h. This is the landing speed of most planes in IL2 and slower than what your car can probably go :grin:

In FSX i just cruise around in it and plan everything in advance, but when flying a mission that simulated firefighting and i had to chop throttles, dive, go full throttle and climb back up over a mountain i ran out of available keyboard shortcuts, crashed and had to refly, this time plannng everything well in advance so that i had time to use the mouse click function. Imagine having to do something similar, but this time you're not dropping water on a forest fire but torpedos against ships that shoot back.

I get excited thinking about the possibiility of seeing it in SoW and doing things like that in a coastal command campaign, but i doubt it's something that will float everyone's boat (or flying boat :-P ).

Even today the restored Cats are neither certified for a modern autopilot because of their contol linkage type and their weird stability, nor flying with a single pilot due to their complexity. The old ones did have an autopilot that worked with vacuum gyros, but on the modern ones this is usually replaced by modern navigation instruments and radios. Also, the old Cats usually had a flight engineer sitting in the centerline wing strut just for keeping the engines within limits, but gradually the controls were moved to the copilot with the engineer's position getting changed to a radio/navigation position for things like long range radio relay, radar scopes and so on.

I'd love to see it make an appearance in IL-2 or SoW, but only if it was possible to convey all that character and even then, i doubt there would be many people willing to fly 10 hour patrols online or have the mission end before they even reach their target. It would be good for single player campaigns though, where we can use time compression.