Campaigns or Training mission for beginner - CloD

[pedalracer]

Hello

do any enthusiats or squads offer any additional missions or campaigns for beginners in order to learn flying and coming around in IL2 Cliffs of Dover?

I must admit that I had such a hard time to get through all the struggle setting up my Saitek X52 and am still having issues with Il2 CloD and TrackIR5 Pro clip (I have now in the driver made the setting that Il2 - any IL2 product uses the CHARVEL profile).

But now I am totally frustrated since just the 1st training mission is making me going mad. Reason?
I have problems to find the 1st right circle I have to fly through....!?!?

The tutor tells me, you are too far right go left and vs and go to 60.
I guess he wants to tell me to go to 60 degrees from my course (2 o'clock) or I have to head for 60 degress or what ever. Since I do not get how to operate the compass in the Moth I am lost in sky until the tutor takes over ))

[Kodoss]

It means 60° on your compass.

But I know what you mean.
A real training campaign in 5 major steps would be great.
1. basic plane behavior and basic navigation(map). 50h (Tiger Moth or Bücker 131[if we would have it])
2. Advanced training (radio navigation, formation starts/flights/landings, blind flight) 50h (was mostly made with old types, Ar-96 would be great for that)
3. Fighter training(Air-Air, Air-Ground) and radio commands. 100h (was mostly made with old types, Ar-96)
4. Bomber/Recon/heavy fighter training. 50h (was mostly made with old types)
5. type training and tactics for them. additionally 20-50h (Spit, Hurri, Bf109, Bf110,...)

nearly 200 hours of training for fighter and 250 for bomber pilots was the standard at this time. But first we need the older crappy planes for a campaign like this.

[Blackdog_kt]

The training missions throw you right into basic flying, but like you said there is not a lot of talk about how aircraft systems operate.

What you can do is google up and do some reading, then try to recreate it yourself in the sim.

There are numerous threads on this forum from the early days after release that explain how various systems work.

In order to get yourself up to speed in terms of aircraft systems, you need a couple of things:

1) an introduction to aircraft engine operation

2) an explanation about the commpass

For the first one, go to the A2A simulations website and browse through their accusim add-ons for FSX. I think their manuals are free to download, so just pick one and start reading. Just make sure it's the accusim version of the add-on manual, because those are the ones that give the details you need.

In fact, i seem to recall that most if not all of them feature the same layout: there is the same preface about engine operating principles and then it details the other systems of the specific add-on aircraft.

What you need is just the preface. It will explain to you what you need to know about operating piston aircraft engines.

About the compass, you can run a search on this forum and you will probably find pictures (or maybe even youtube videos) explaining how to do it.

I can also give you a text walkthrough.
The RAF magnetic compasses consist of two parts: a movable needle inside the compass liquid and a rotating bezel around the compass assembly.

The needle points north (the T shaped end of the needle). To read your heading, you align the outside rotating bezel so that the N marking of the bezel aligns with the T-shaped end of the needle. Then you read the heading at the top (12 o'clock position) of the rotating bezel.

For example, let's say your T is pointing to the left of the compass at the 9 o'clock position. This means that north is approximately 90 degrees to your left, so you expect that you are moving eastwards. If you rotate the bezel to match the N marking of the bezel with the T shape of the needle, you will see that the markings on the front of the bezel (at the 12 o'clock position) read 90 degrees or thereabouts, confirming your suspicion.

You can also use the compass to set a heading to fly by doing the reverse: rotate the bezel so that the heading you want to fly is at the top of the compass (12 o'clock position), then turn the aircraft around until the T of the needle aligns with the N mark on the bezel.

To rotate the bezel you either click on it, or assign keys through the game's control options to the function "course setter increase" and "course setter decrease".

An important note to remember is that magnetic deviation is modeled. You magnetic heading is always off by 10 degrees to the west. So, if you want to fly due east (a heading of 90 degrees), you should add 10 degrees and set the magnetic heading-to-fly at 100 degrees, if you want to fly NE at a heading of 45 degrees you should set it to 55, if you want to fly due west at 270 degrees you should set it to 280, and so on.


Knowing how to start and manage your engine as well as how to find your way around, you can now do your own training flights:

Go into the quick mission builder and select the cross country mission.

The default aircraft for this mission is the Blenheim twin-engined bomber. Click on the aircraft icon and a list of available aircraft to fly will appear.

Scroll through until you see the Tiger Moth training biplane.

Double click on it.

You have now changed the aircraft to fly and you can go ahead and start the mission.

First turn the engine on. To do this you turn on the fuel supply first. If you haven't bound keys to it, you can simply hover your mouse cursor over the various parts of the cockpit. It will change into a hand icon if something is clickable and it will also display a pop-up tooltip telling you what it is. You are looking for the fuel cock lever (if i recall correctly, it's under the left side of the instrument panel).

Then you slightly advance your throttle (about 5%-10% of the way) and set the fuel mixture to rich. Fuel mixture levers are reversed in RAF aircraft, rich mixture is with the lever backwards and lean mixture with the lever forward. So, you need to pull the mixture lever all the way back.

Then, you can press I (the default key for ignition). The engine should come to life. You should wait a bit until it's warmed up, which you can judge from throttle response and the RPM gauge. If it's idling and the RPM is erratic or it coughs and sputters when you advance the throttle, then it's cold.

Just give it a bit of throttle to assist in warming up but not so much that it starts rolling on the runway or cuts out. I think the Tiger Moth doesn't have brakes, but it has a tail skid. You can keep it stationary by pulling your stick back. This uses the airflow generated by the propeller to keep your tail down and "digs" the tail skid into the ground.

Once you see that the RPMs have stabilized a bit, throttle up slightly. If engine response is satisfactory and it doesn't cut out, go ahead and smoothly move throttle to full.

Relax back pressure on the stick and it should start rolling down the runway. Wait until the tail comes up and maybe a couple of seconds more, then lightly pull back on the stick and you should be airborne.

The reason you gradually advance throttle is that you want to give it time to accelerate without the propeller torque becoming too much. If you push the throttle to maximum instantly, you will get a lot of torque while you are still at low speed and the airflow over your controls is not enough to compensate.


Also, all this engine management is for the appropriate difficulty settings. If you disable complex engine management and temperature effects, you can probably just start it and go immediately.


Before taking off, set yourself an arbitrary waypoint on the map, estimate a bearing from your current position and set your compass to fly there.

The Moth is very easy and a joy to fly as well as slow, so you can easily focus on correcting your course and sightseeing through your flight, without getting swamped with things to do until you get comfortable with basic flying.

Two final things to remember.

After you take off and make your turn towards your waypoint, reduce throttle to obtain cruise power (probably not necessary for easier difficulty settings). The propeller in the Moth has a fixed pitch (the angle of the blades), so changing throttle directly affects the RPM. For this reason, it doesn't have a separate instrument showing engine power but only uses the RPM gauge.

Being a trainer aircraft it tries to keep things simple too: maximum power that can be safely used continuously is when the RPM needle is at the top (12 o'clock position) of the RPM dial (i think it's about 1800 RPM). That's why the dial scale is mounted offset, instead of remembering a number the pilot just has to remember to keep the needle pointing up.

The last thing to remember is the throttle/mixture linkage. Flying higher will require you to lean your mixture to match the dropping density of the air outside (less air getting in the engine through the intakes needs less fuel to burn, if you have too much fuel it will run rough and lose power).

However, if you abruptly pull the throttle back it might create a situation of sudden fuel starvation. For this reason, whenever you pull the throttle back the mixture lever is also pulled back: the mixture lever can not be ahead of the throttle lever. This is also why mixture is reversed, it's a simple way to prevent pilots forgetting about it. If you pull the throttle back the mixture gets richer without you having to do anything about it.

The reverse is not true and if you advance your throttle again you will have to manually lean the mixture again for best performance.

Finally, the engine works with gravity-fed carburetors. Flying inverted or pushing the stick forward can create momentary fuel starvation and the engine will cut out. Persisting might result in the engine shutting down, in which case you can go into a gliding dive to windmill the prop and as long as your ignition is on it should catch again. If all else fails make a gliding landing into a field, the Moth is small and slow enough to fit almost everywhere.


That's all from me. Remember to take it slow and do equal parts of things to keep you interested. Don't go reading 200 pages about aircraft engines nor go flying straight away. Do 15-30 minutes of reading and go try it out.
This will not only let you learn at a comfortable pace, it will also set you up for easily achievable goals that will enhance your sense of achievement and satisfaction with the simulator.

Just do the cross country mission for a few times, until you get comfortable navigating from your starting field to another one that is 30-60 minutes away and landing there (this could take you as little as one or two attempts, or as much as a 2-3 evenings). Then you can probably move to a higher performance aircraft. I think you will have a much better learning curve doing things at your own pace, instead of having a computer instructor barking directions at you

I've been flight simming for 19 years and the first few days with CoD all i did was select the free flight from the quick mission builder and test one aircraft at a time. There's nothing to be ashamed of, we've all been there and to tell you the truth, the part i enjoy most in every new simulator is learning to fly each new plane.

So, do a little bit of reading up and go fly. Oh and have fun

[CharveL]

Glad you like it.

Give yourself a chance to get a feel for the TIR response curves so you can tweak it more to your specific circumstances. I prefer a smaller dead-zone these days but at first you might want a bigger one until you get oriented so you can line up the sights better.

Unfortunately CoD is pretty much just a really cool tech demo and I doubt we'll ever see any real content for the battle of Brittain that isn't awkward, from the developers. The comms are a mess, and for me the engine likes to go almost silent when I'm checking six so the audio is still a bit lame which is another immersion killer amongst many.

Still, the damage modelling and flight physics feel pretty good and there's bound to be some decent user made content eventually, once they've managed to dig out of this hole.

It's not like there's much else out there.

[pedalracer]

Dear friends of the sky,

First of all, I must apologise for answering so late to your very and detailed explanation to the end. Normally I would try to answer in time of course but this time we had some family issues (illness).
Then, I want deeply thank you for the time you took to answer my questions. I understood now fully how the compass worked in WW 2 and how it is meant to work in IL2.
Additionally to your explanation, I did some research on the Internet and on the immediacy mentioned then some PDF files about different versions of compasses the pilot of that era worked with. For example:
The P4 Compass.pdf
Technik fuer Flugzeugfuehrer.pdf (I'm German as you might have noticed already and therefore I have no problems skimming through these German handbooks but on the other hand I got more problems to write correct English. And that's the reason why my writings are more of the brief form. So I apologise for that.)
And I get some handbooks of missions 4 today and the essential inpursuit and Nugget's guide.

Very helpful for me was your tip to go to the quick missions builder and to choose the cross-country mission. Moreover, I didn't know that I can now choose a plane for each of these missions. It is great to start flying on a Tiger Moth. At least for me and now that many pilots didn't get the chance of a training flight in Tiger Moth and were thrown directly into a bomber plane.

I also liked your detailed explanation of getting around in the plane and getting the engine running, the plane taking off and then finding your way in the sky by basic navigational skills. Following your instructions I will be able to get the feeling of flying in IL2 and eventually I might dig into complex engine management.

Best of all was the following statement of yours that I would like to cite:
remember to take it slow and do equal parts of things to keep you interested. Don't go reading 200 pages about aircraft engines nor go flying straight away… Just do the cross-country mission for a few times, until you get comfortable navigating from your starting view to another one that is 30 to 60 min away and landing there.

[ATAG_Doc]

If you want my 2 cents skip all that. Just get in a plane and trial and error. You will burn up / blow up many planes before you get it. Watch start up videos on youtube tons of them out there. When you have got it down just do what the read guys did. Your baptismal into battle should be like the men that came before you. Right away. You will be shot up and down. But once you get that first one under your belt you're off to the races and addicted. Just do it!

[skouras]

here you can buy some excellent campaigns
it also have training mssions for spitfire and Hurri

http://www.desastersoft.com/en/news.html


just download the demo first

[Marmusman]

I didn't see anybody mention this site, so here it is:

Airwarfare.com has missions and campaigns. Check out their downloads section. Most typically start out with just take-off, do a loop, then land...then move on to more complex objectives.

http://airwarfare.com/sow/index.php

The site is a little underutilized, in my opinion. Their sister site, Mission4Today, is the golden standard for all things IL-2:1946. It is a great place to upload and download files for Cliffs of Dover.

[jf1981]

Some lecture if you'd like to understand how to navigate.
There's a drawing of the british aircraft compass as well so you can see how to easily read your heading.

http://jean-francois-simon.com/large...Navigation.pdf

Remember the yellow T points the north. Make in your mind up a picture of N-S-E-W and you get your rough heading that immediately.

[bolox]

bundled up a few missions for someone a while back
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?do6r6vwewyc811u

hurricane based single player offline missions
Includes a takeoff/ fly around/land mission, a formation flying mission, a triangle navigation course (with on screen courses given at waypoints) and then a couple of combat introduction missions.

maybe of use?