Give me some "holy sh... did that just happen" ideas

[Blackdog_kt]

Feathered's ideas are excellent once again, plus his narrative puts you right in the action. For me the top 3 would be:

1) Believable AI and a solid communication system:
Incorporate the kind of modular and mission specific commands that Feathered describes in the player's interaction with the AI, whether that AI are wingmen, ground control, ground troops, crew members or other friendly units.

2) Realistic start-up sequences and systems modelling, with the possibility of later mods/add-ons for optional clickable cockpits:
Despite certain shortcomings in the FS series, FSX does a pretty good job at this. Even if the buttons are hidden under the yoke, you can cycle the camera to the appropriate cockpit spot to press switches or take a closer look at hard to reach instruments. RoF does this well too, pause the TrackIR if you have one, move your viewpoint via the assigned keyboard functions and save it in your presets, which are by the way aircraft specific. This could be toggle or snap view. So for example, pressing keypad 8 in a fighter gives you a zoomed-in view of the gunsight, pressing it in the bomber's pilot seat zooms in on the primary flight instruments and doing the same while in the bomb aimer's seat will give you a look through the bombsight, or through the drift-meter when you are on the navigator's position.

Of course, this doens't have to be a click-everything-yourself affair if you don't want to. Just like in FSX and Black Shark, there should be an automatic engine start and shutdown sequence BUT it should also go through the full checklist and the engine might not fire up if it's cold, you might need to dilute the oil first or ask the ground crew to feed some warmed up oil into the engine. Then, you should have to pay attention to how the engine works and warm it up properly. Imagine this when flying a scramble with enemy fighters approaching, interesting stuff.

Also, please use the rated power settings as per the manufacturer's instructions whenever possible. Just because the Spit can make 25lbs of boost or the 190 can reach 1.4 ata manifold pressure, doesn't mean it was possible to run the engine at those settings forever like we can in IL2. For example, the maximum sustained rating for most Spits was 8lbs and similarly, the FW190 was, if i remember correctly, rated at 1.2 for climbs and 1.4 was used only in emergencies for 5 minutes or so. Ideally, we wouldn't need "throttle:100%" messages, but we should be opening our kneepad if we don't remember the values off-hand (see below), check the recommended power settings, advance throttles until the manifold gauge shows the desired readout, adjust prop-pitch to the desired RPM and that's it. The RPM needle would dance a bit back and forth before stabilising and the manifold pressure would slowly drop as we climbed, making it necessary to push the throttle forward a bit more every few thousand feet gained, but that's how real aircraft fly too.

The bottom line is that we need to get past the point of modelling only the aircraft behaviour and consequent tactics and finally start modelling the systems in some detail, putting the gauge back in the game. It makes flying more complicated and rewarding, gives you something to do that has a real impact on the outcome of your mission instead of just flying along a certain heading until you reach the target, it's an extra incentive to interact with your AI crew or human co-pilots in multi-crewed aircraft and it will make you think more and plan ahead on how you conduct your attacks in single-seaters. For example, the P47 is much more powerful than the Fw190 up high, but the 190 is fully automatic while the P47 needs some careful monitoring of the turbochargers and so on.

If you to know what i'm really talking about, search youtube for the P47 add-on for FSX made by A2A simulations and make sure you view the videos of the accu-sim enhanced aircraft, the way they model the aircraft's systems are superb. For multi-crewed aircraft, their Boeing Stratocruiser with the accu-sim patch is also very well done. It's a four engined plane and each engine presents some variance in temperatures, produced power and generally in how their systems operate, just like in real life. Your throttles are all in the same position, but engine 1 might be running a little hotter than the rest, the turbocharger on engine 3 might be running a bit hot as well and you have your hands full just flying the plane. Luckily, you have crewmen to monitor such things and report to help you out, the flight engineer can take care of calibrating the turbochargers for you and the co-pilot will call out the appropriate speeds and call "rotate" during your take-off run.

Having something similar in SoW would make flying multi-crewed and mutli-engined aircraft much more interesting and rewarding, plus it would make flying fighters something that requires a bit more caution. With all these systems modelled there's a good chance that a careless pilot might break his engine before the enemy has a chance to do it themselves, which will lead to more cautious and realistic flying on everyone's part.

3) Navigation maps, charts, notes, kneepad and a thorough briefing:
This would obviously tie in with the previous two points, as in mutlti-crewed aircraft you could let the AI do the navigation and just give you vectors to correct your course. You could switch to the navigator's position and look at the map yourself, or you could open the communication menu by pressing TAB and ask him to give you a fix on your position, ETA to the next waypoint and so on. Let's have the appropriate systems as well, communication radios to tune to the correct frequencies, direction fiding equipment and radio-navigation aids that fit the time period in question.

As for the briefing, take a look at this documentary of RAF bomber command night operations. That guy has about a dozen sliding blackboards full of info and each crewmember needs to take note of different things. It also features a post-op debrief:
http://www.factualtv.com/documentary/Nightbombers

Ideally, when flying you should be able to open your dossier and view anything from aircraft checklists to mission briefing to personal notes. These notes could be made during the briefing or even during the mission, on top of the original briefing material, the nav map or a blank piece of paper. Just give us an in-flight notebook and some colored pencils, so we can note down the radio frequencies we need to use or mark that new flak battery on the map for another flight to suppress tomorrow.

As for the maps and charts, i'm thinking of the usual ingame map, zoomable and slewable, but with some extra perks. For example, having separate charts showing the layout of friendly bases, tower frequencies, available facilities and the usual approaches would be good. That is because when flying an expansion 3-4 years from now, your battered Lancaster makes it back to England at 3am and it's pitch black with fog, you can take a look at the map and pick the nearest airbases, look them up in their airfield specific charts and request to divert to one with big runways and a FIDO defogging system.

Sitting on the navigator's bench should not just mean that you look through the side window, since you should have a couple of slide-rulers to make conversions and calculations with, plus some plotting tools. I'm thinking something along the lines of Silent Hunter III, with a compass, a ruler and a protractor to measure angles and be able to draw up a flight plan, even on the fly when actually flying the mission if the need arises. In IL2 the gyro compass might automatically point to the next waypoint, but in reality you have to set the heading bug and estimate the distances yourself, or with the aid of your navigator/copilot.

Of course, this would make flying single seaters all the more challenging, as it would also mean that you are either good enough to fly visually and not get lost, rely on the heavies you are escorting for guidance, or you have made a good flight plan before having to engage the enemy. You can't really draw pretty lines on the map with a 109 on your six over occupied Europe, but you can do it before the flight, while the rest of the wing is taxiing to take-off positions or even during the climb-out over the North Sea when things are still calm, using the base briefing material that the sim always supplies you with on each flight as a start. Having a lobby within the server where players can draw up detailed briefings in multiplayer, make notes and distribute it to others will come in handy too.


Now i know some of this stuff seems like too much, some might not be top priorities and all would take quite some time to come to fruition. I'm fully aware of that, i'm not in a hurry and i'm not expecting them to be in the boxed game on release day. However, i would be very delighted to see them come along as the sim progresses, since it will add a totally new dimension to prop-era combat flight sims. I've been having a go at some civilian flying on a friend's PC, he's got FSX and some quality payware add-ons and to tell you the truth, i realised that there's so much involved to actually just flying the plane, any plane, monitoring the various systems and navigating within certain rules and procedures, that i'm missing it on combat flight sims now. I think we should go towards combining these intricacies of flying a plane into the combat flight sim genre, so that just flying around over the countryside in a Hurricane, or buzzing Abeville in a 109 will be an involving, satisfying task in and of itself, long before the shooting even begins.