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Old 04-15-2011, 02:40 AM
Blackdog_kt Blackdog_kt is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2008
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To bomb with the Luftwaffe bombers you might want to learn the autopilot first.

The process goes roughly like this:

1) Trim for level flight.

2) Look at your magnetic compass and input that heading to your directional gyro (enabling the mouse cursor and hovering over an instrument gives you pop-ups with the instrument read-outs, very useful when making adjustments like these). If you don't have any keys mapped to it, you can click on the rotating knob on the directional gyro to increment it. It's best to do this on the runway while idling and steady (don't apply throttle and use brakes to keep it steady, because acceleration of any kind messes up the magnetic compass), but you will need to correct it during flight as well (once every 10-15 minutes) and if you are flying quick missions you don't have that luxury anyway due to the air-start.

3) There's two compass card read-outs in the directional gyro. One is showing the current heading (as long as you did step 2 correctly), the other shows your intended heading.
This is separate to the repeater compass, which also has a heading selector function. However, the directional gyro and the repeater compass are completely independent instruments, the autopilot is fed the data it needs via the gyro so focus on that.
With the gyro showing the correct heading, move the second compass card to align it with the current heading (i mapped keys to this since in some aircraft the controls are a bit hard to click in the cockpit). This tells the aircraft that you want to keep flying your current route, which prevents sudden changes of heading when you engage the autopilot.

4) Turn on the autopilot in course mode (i don't know what R22 mode is, i suspect it's something to do with radio navigation). It might wobble a bit left and right until it stabilizes but not much. Also, i think it's not a full 3-axis autopilot, i was able to keep climbing by using appropriate trim and power settings even though the AP was on and keeping me on my selected course. So you will probably have to trim the elevators regardless of what the AP is doing.

5) Set up your bomb run (arm bombs, set salvo, etc), go to the bomb-sight view and look for the target. To make corrections, use the same keys you used to rotate the second compass card in the directional gyro. If all goes well, the aircraft will lazily make an S-turn for every change you input (i think it does this because it tries to keep course and not just heading, so it intercepts a course and then turns the opposite way to "ride" the radial you select).

6) Assuming you're heading straight for the target, input your altitude above ground level and your TAS, place the sights on the target, engage the automatic bomb drop and wait.

I haven't been able to make it work just yet (i haven't flown much in the past 3-4 days), but i'll probably put some time into it during the weekend.
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