I had a small test sortie yesterday, i started the cross country mission (so that i could also practice the start-up and take-off) in a He111 and decided to fly to London and find something to bomb.
First of all, there seems to a be a small bug, when you first open your bomb bay doors one of the bombs will drop out of its own accord, as if it was only held in place by the bay doors. Other than that, the other 7 bombs dropped and exploded just fine (i had 8xsc250 loaded).
As far as the actual bombing goes, i have a feeling that either the cross country mission has a wind layer enabled or the Lofte gyros take some time to stabilize. I had only climbed to 1800 meters and was cruising at 280km/h IAS, so my TAS should be about 300km/h. I switched to the bombardier's view, armed bombs, set salvo and bomb spacing and then looked through the bombsight. Just like in IL2, i entered my altitude and then turned on sight automation while aiming at a far away point in order to calibrate my ground speed: if the sight drifts down from the point you want to track, decrease the ground speed value, if it drifts up increase it. When the sight is steady over an arbitrary point on the ground, you have the correct ground speed.
Well, seems like the correct one was initially a mere 150km/h, but as i kept going closer to the target i increased it to 280km/h and the sight was steady. Since it's a bit impossible to have 130km/h winds in a quick mission, i suppose that it takes time for the sight to stabilize properly.
I attacked a bridge and while i did miss again i was actually about 200 meters from scoring a hit on it, which is much better than my previous attempts. I also don't know if the ground on the river banks is elevated above water lever and how much, as that could also cause the bombs to miss: if you are flying at 2km and bombing a target that is 200m above sea level, you will still miss if you just use 2km as the value in the bombsight...the correct is 2km-200m=1800m, we need to take into account the target's altitude as well.
As for the autopilot, i've found out that it always settles a bit off. In the end the aircraft is stable and can be easily flown for long periods of time with the autopilot, as long as the course changes are not too big. The AP only turns the aircaft, so if you command a big heading change it will roll too much and you will lose altitude.
However, the autopilot doesn't disable the pilot's controls.
This leads me to believe that
a) The AP is only meant to be used for minor corrections during straight and level flight and the bomb-run and
b) Maybe we're supposed to correct it when it's behaving strange.
For example, like i said above, if i am flying a heading of 60 degrees, set my directional gyro to 60 and my desired heading to 60 before engaging it, it will start by doing its little left and right turns (that's probably normal as the gyros spin up and align) and then settle after a minute or so but it will not be flying the heading i requested. From that point on it's no big deal to correct things, since it's level, stable and less than 5-10 degrees off: if i want to turn a bit i just alter the desired heading a bit and let it turn, i can see where i'm going from the directional gyro.
I don't know if i'm making sense, what i'm trying to say is that when the plane does go level and stabilizes, it does at a heading 5-10 degrees different than the one at which the AP is set to follow.
For my next test, i will try to "fight" the controls and keep it steady on a selected heading while the AP stabilizes, just to see if i can align it precisely.
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