SOW: your thoughts on clickable cockpits and realistic start-up

[Blackdog_kt]

I can't believe this is ressurected, but it's somewhat of a weird coincidence because i've spent quite some time with clickpits lately.

The last couple of months i've been flying FSX on a friend's PC when i visit him. I never got into FSX before, i don't own FSX and i don't believe the flight models are necessarily better than the combat sims we usually fly. I just got interested one day when i went over his place to visit and i saw the shiny graphics (he's got an environment add-on that is the best thing i've seen up to the latest spitfire video we've seen a couple of weeks back) and sat down to see what he was doing out of sheer curiosity.

I also don't fly trans-atlantic flights in an Airbus or do airline stuff. You see, that buddy of mine has spent quite an amount of money over the years and has amassed a collection of add-on aircraft for FSX that blow the stock ones out of the water.

So, what we do take turns flying when we are having a flight-sim evening is mainly small, bush-flying aircraft with STOL capabilities, amphibians or vintage birds and that includes warbirds as well. I also have spent minimal time on IL2 since i started getting into this habit, because the aircraft suddently started feeling too "easy" for lack of a better word. Not that i wouldn't get my behind handed to me online if i didn't have network problems, what i'm talking about is not easy in the sense that the FMs are not good (to the contrary, most of the FSX FMs are worse than IL2's), but i feel like the planes in IL2 are suddenly "empty" and too predictable and they don't give me the feeling that there's a bazillion nuts and bolts and turning bits that might fail. To put it accurately, the aircraft in IL2 don't scare me anymore and they don't strike awe and fear anymore into my flight-simming soul as they used to do in the past.

Let me tell you that clickpit or no clickpit, just flying around in the A2A P-47 and watching all the gauges move, with display errors as well due to engine vibration, is one of the best simming experiences i've had in my life. If you think you know the way to execute a boom and zoom attack in a Jug because you fly IL2, think again because you know NOTHING. I didn't know either and we could say that i still don't since i haven't actually done it, but i can at least finally feel and appreciate a tiny bit of the workload involved without the anxiety of possible fiery death that comes with real air combat.

In IL-2 you just select your thottle setting to avoid overspeed and dive on the bandit. To add insult to injury, regardless of aircraft type most of us follow a completely unrealistic procedure that can cause extreme malfunction in real life, we dive with rads open and throttle at idle to cool the engine fast, so that we can push it to overheat later. Well, if the in-game standard procedure being the exact opposite of what applies to the real world is not enough of an indication that something needs fixing in the next sim, i don't know what is. A real engine might suffer anything from rough running, to cracks that lead to reduced performance and higher fuel burn, to outright seizure with no possibility of restart if the cylinders are cooled from 250 degrees Celsius down to 100 C in the span of less than 20 seconds.

In the A2A Jug before you even think of diving you have to
1) Pull back the turbocharger lever. Yes sirs, the Jug is like having two throttles instead of one, you use the throttle up to about 7-10k ft and from then on you use the turbo lever and you have to develop a feel for it, because the turbocharger fan is slower to react to inputs due to inertia. It certainly isn't a point and shoot aircraft.
2) Pull back the throttle
3) Select a good RPM range to keep from overspeeding
4) Close your cowl flaps to prevent shock cooling of the cylinders
5) Adjust intercooler flaps (for the carburator temperatures) in expectance of cooling due to the high speed dive
6) Now you can dive on the bandit.

Does it sound hard? Yes. Is it really that hard? Not by a long-shot. Is it closer to what they really had to do when flying a Jug? Definitely.

With a fidgety TrackIR set (my track-clip Pro is broken and i have it held together with duct-tape) and no real HOTAS or pedals (just an old sidewinder precision 2 stick), it takes me about 5-7 seconds to put the plane in diving configuration for a boom and zoom attack. If i map the necessary inputs to the keyboard i can probably start the dive immediately and look through the gunsight while i simultaneously press the necessary keys, it's not like we'll exceed safe engine parameters in the first 5 seconds of the dive anyway.

Other aircarft i've flown with my buddy in FSX are Fw190A and Spitfire variants and Catalinas (both vintage and restored versions) and they are a blast just to fly around in. We did a 500km nap of the earh run in a 190 one day at maximum continuous power skimming over the trees at 470km/h, a 10 hour flight in a catalina from the Bahamas to St.Maartin at 7000ft while taking turns at the wheel and doing a measly 100knots the following two evenings.

If the aircraft feels like real machinery and can create the illusion that it's operating like the real one, it's a joy just to operate it and fly around. And that's coming from someone who was never a big fan of FSX or airliner jets, was never a fan of jets in general (except Mig Alley), was never a fan of anything too complicated in regards to air combat simulations and is still not a big fan of the stock FSX aircraft.
But if you see some of the add-on 3rd party vintage birds for FSX and don't think "i wish we get something that feels this real in SoW someday", well, sell your joysticks and your simming gear because you're in the wrong hobby.

So, instead of focusing on wether we want clickpits or not (which is merely an interface question), let's focus on wether we want realistic systems modelling on our aircraft (which is what really has some bearing on the gameplay, since our gameplay is about realism), because the real warbirds of WWII were far more complicated than what we have in IL2.


IL2 is still a great combat sim and it was king in its day, but it's getting old.
In comparison with other simulated aircraft i've recently flown, the aircraft of IL2 feel like a collection of arithmetic properties and not a breathing, living piece of dangerous machinery that's oozing character around you as you sit in the cockpit.
The engines always run the same, always overheat the same, even fail the same if you do manage to push them over the limit, you got 2000 horsepower, a few thousand pounds of weight, a dozen aerodynamic parameters and a bunch of guns, now run wild and play along with them. Sorry, but that is not good enough for a modern sim. It was perfect for the time IL2 hit the market and the following years, because there was nothing with a higher level of detail to compare to. Well, now there is.

That's what mostly missing from IL2, character in the machinery, and is precisely what i hope to see in the next title. We know the graphics are outstanding, we know the FMs and DMs will be top notch, we know the sound will be good and we have received word that the AI and the campaign will be improved. That's the only thing left to truly make SoW shine, make the plane around you feel as real as possible, so that even when flying around the countryside with not a bandit in sight you'll have something to occupy yourself with and feel good doing it, because suddenly you realize...

"Man, it's almost as if i have my personal little time machine here. I'm dodging flocks of seagulls over Dover in my Hurri and while it's not exactly frantic, i still have to flick that switch here and push that lever there and keep an eye on my temps because it's a hot summer day, regardless of the interface i use to do it, and it feels warm, alive and REAL!"

Most of all however, such a thing will add a whole new dimension to combat as well. If you have to keep your systems within acceptable parameters, you'll also have to plan things way ahead. This introduces something that's missing big time from combat sims. We do have the surprise factor, the instinct and talent factor, the tacticians, the marksmen and the oustanding furballers, but we lack a very important aspect that characterized much of the aerial warfare of the time: casualties because of mounting workload. This intertwines with all the rest and will make engagements all the more realistic. People might not press on like there's no tomorrow, more people breaking from fights, conservative survivalist tactics, and yet, even if you do break away that battle damage might mean that you get a cascading failure of aircarft systems that you can't cope with, a mountain that's slowly crumpling all around you and is about to swallow you. This is what makes for exciting flying, having something to scare you even after the combat is over and you're well inside friendly territory.

Don't think that in the heat of combat these guys used to fly with checklists like in FSX, it's just that after a few flights you develop a feel for the aircarft and start understanding what's right and what's wrong without having to look up the manuals all the time, plus most of the instruments are marked and you know not to put the needle in the red zone for more than a couple of minutes.
So, while it's a bit of extra knowledge to learn, it adds tons of immersion and if we have good interfacing options it will not inconvenience anybody. Heck, let's have customized views for each aircraft (like it is in RoF) so we can pan the view and click if we want, and let's also have the possibility of mapping them to keyboard and HOTAS so we don't click anything if we don't want to. In the end, all the important stuff will go on keyboard and HOTAS and the customized,"frozen" snap views will be used for things like startup, shutdown, zoomed in gunsights and switching tanks.

I think all of this should be falling under systems management and not stictly clickpits, as that is somewhat misleading. It's not a question of useless interfacing, it's a question of highly necessary and overdue realism settings that need to be added. And if someone doesn't like it and wants the old IL2 style model, just click "simplified engine management" in the difficulty settings and you're good to go