tail wheel lock?

[Blackdog_kt]

First of all, an answer to the initial post. A lot of the aircraft modeled in the sim didn't have lockable tailwheels in real life. Most of them used a free castoring tailwheel and this is reflected in the sim.

Now, as to the flap questions...if your observations are correct then we can set partial flaps in the Blenheim which is awesome, because (according to the pilot's handbook) taking off with heavier loads (a lot of fuel plus bombs) needs to be done with 15 degrees of flaps.

Generally speaking, the control logic for flaps (and any other control for that matter) depends on how it was done in the real aircraft.

In the 109 for example, the pilot had to turn a wheel by hand. To reflect the continuous manual effort required to do so, the sim requires the player to keep the key pressed: as long as you keep the flaps up/down key pressed the wheel is turning and the flaps extend/retract, as soon as you let go of the key the wheel stops turning and the flaps stay in their last position.

In the Hurricane it's different because it had a flap motor with a 3-way switch: up, down and neutral. Pressing your flaps up/down key will move the control lever, not the flaps. What the flaps do depends on where the lever is set. If you set it down, the motor starts working to extend them. At that point if you press "flaps up" the lever will go from the "down" position to the "neutral" position, the motor will stop and the flaps will stay there, partially extended. If you then press the "flaps up" key one more time, the lever will move from the "neutral" to the "up" position and the motor will start working in reverse to retract them.

This is also how the flaps work in the Ju88, how the landing gear works in the 109, 110, Hurricane and possibly others too (as long as you've set seperate gear up/down keys) and so on.

The Spitfire on the other hand had only a two-position switch in the cockpit and only two positions of flaps: fully retracted and fully extended.
Pressing flaps up/down moves the switch to the relevant direction and sets the flaps according to the switch's position.


As for the Blenheim, in my experience the flap handling in the sim is similar to the Spitfire: if i press flaps down the control is set one way and they extend fully, if i press flaps up it's set the other way and they fully retract.

However, the pilot's operating handbook states that in the real aircraft it was possible to set partial flaps by "forcing" the control to a certain position. Maybe this is also simulated in CoD by applying a different method of control. So, maybe if we just press the key once the flaps deploy/retract completely, but if we keep the key pressed they deploy/retract only for as long as the key is held down?

If so it's pretty interesting, not to mention somewhat necessary for setting partial flaps for take-off (more lift than drag, as opposed to full flaps which cause more drag than lift for the purpose of slowing down for landing) and getting that beast off the ground without risking engine trouble.

I'll be off to test it and report back

EDIT: Nope, doesn't seem to do the trick, flaps in the in-game Blenheim are just like the Spit, either fully up or fully down.