Hey TD can you look again at the Corsair..

[Freelansir]

Regarding trim, I found the best first-person description from Bud Anderson's story "He was only trying to kill me".

A lot of this is just instinct now. Things are happening too fast to think everything out. You steer with your right hand and feet. The right hand also triggers the guns. With your left, you work the throttle, and keep the airplane in trim, which is easier to do than describe.

Any airplane with a single propeller produces torque. The more horsepower you have, the more the prop will pull you off to one side. The Mustangs I flew used a 12-cylinder Packard Merlin engine that displaced 1,649 cubic inches. That is 10 times the size of the engine that powers an Indy car. It developed power enough that you never applied full power sitting still on the ground because it would pull the plane's tail up off the runway and the propeller would chew up the concrete. With so much power, you were continually making minor adjustments on the controls to keep the Mustang and its wing-mounted guns pointed straight.

There were three little palm-sized wheels you had to keep fiddling with. They trimmed you up for hands-off level flight. One was for the little trim tab on the tail's rudder, the vertical slab which moves the plane left or right. Another adjusted the tab on the tail's horizontal elevators that raise or lower the nose and help reduce the force you had to apply for hard turning. The third was for aileron trim, to keep your wings level, although you didn't have to fuss much with that one. Your left hand was down there a lot if you were changing speeds, as in combat . . . while at the same time you were making minor adjustments with your feet on the rudder pedals and your hand on the stick. At first it was awkward. But, with experience, it was something you did without thinking, like driving a car and twirling the radio dial.

It's a little unnerving to think about how many things you have to deal with all at once to fly combat.

[Luno13]

Most aircraft of that era did have some kind of demarcation or marking to tell the pilot how much trim was applied; the FW 190 has its elevation trim setting in a readout on the left side panel, the Mustang's elevator, rudder and aileron trim knobs have their degrees of offset marked off (and some of this is incompletely portrayed in the game). However, most of the aircraft in the game are not given the benefit of an animated (and correctly labeled) trim knobs and wheels--and it's hard to glance down and read the ones that do work the way a pilot in the actual aircraft's cockpit could.

I can tell you that it is not all that important to see where that demarcation is. In a real airplane, you use trim by feel alone. It's not even a case of memorizing where the best trim locations are over time; you just don't ever look at the trim wheel, and you can still use it properly from day one. After all, it's not like there are demarcations on the yoke or pedals to study, right?

The only trim location that was ever marked in any way on the planes I've flown is "neutral" for landing and takeoff in normal conditions. Even then, it's more of a guideline and you should trim the aircraft based on feel. This is true for aircraft that use electrical trim with a button or a trim wheel.

That's also just how it works with Il-2: You adjust the trim until it feels right (ie, you don't have to put force into the joystick) and if need be, you just hit the trim reset button to center the trim again automatically for takeoff and landing, and re-trim from there. It's quite simple, and it works very well.

[horseback]

Originally Posted by Freelansir

Regarding trim, I found the best first-person description from Bud Anderson's story "He was only trying to kill me".

Anderson's account is the first thing that comes up any time complaints about the Mustang's trim behavior in-game arise; what people tend to forget is that Anderson had a co-author--the same fellow who worked on Chuck Yeager's book with Yeager. It gives the customers 'what they want'--which is drama.

Had the pilot of the 109 he was fighting survived the fight, his memoir might have included stuff about how slow the stabilizer trim wheel responded, or how heavy the rudder got as he compensated for the higher or lower speeds as he climbed and dived, how the supercharger became steadily less effective the higher he went, the way the windshield kept frosting up or how sloppy the stick got at 10km (and all of these things can be read about in any number of well known resources like Caldwell's JG 26: Top Guns of the Luftwaffe), and then his thirty something civilian co-author would still ask him to 'punch it up' for the reading audience of the late 1980s.

I've read a number of pilot memoirs that state quite flatly that the Mustang didn't need a lot of trimming in combat because the stick forces were exceptionally light and well balanced by the standards of the time; Anderson's comment simply shocked me when I read it for the first time because it contradicts almost everything else I had read on the subject. You trimmed for level flight on long distance escorts, sudden changes in power and for the depletion of fuel in the wing tanks (otherwise, there would have been no need for aileron trim), and you would add a little nose up trim for landings; everything else was reported as a matter of pilot preference.

I long ago transcribed the trimming sections of America's Hundred Thousand for the old UbiSoft Il-2 forums; I'll be happy to post them here, along with 354th FG ace Richard Turner's description of the flying qualities of the Mustang, or David McCampbell's description of the Hellcat, if you need more proof.

cheers

horseback

[horseback]

These are my first efforts: I find that just attaching the pictures works better than trying to attach the whole Excel Workbook and allows greater access for everyone. The longer and flatter the curve, the better the acceleration over time. Notice how much faster and better accelerating the early P-40E is than the later P-40M.

cheers

horseback

[horseback]

More Charts: RAF vs LW, Spit IX vs Mustang and Japan. Again, the lower and flatter, the better the acceleration. Look for the anomalies in the curves; these may be indicators of the odd behaviors I noted earlier or inconsistencies in the FM.

Enjoy/debate.

cheers

horseback

[Freelansir]

Regarding trim, I found the best first-person description from Bud Anderson's story "He was only trying to kill me".

Originally Posted by horseback

Anderson's account is the first thing that comes up any time complaints about the Mustang's trim behavior in-game arise

I wasn't complaining about a darn thing, just pointing out a book that the author takes the time to include details flying a fighter.

[sniperton]

Gens, this discussion is getting out of control. Simply too many aspects of this great game are blurred together. What if this thread were continued as separate threads?

- late-war high-performance aircraft issue (if any);
- relation of FM and flight controls discussion (trim, charts, etc);
- cockpit/hud display of control settings issue (what must/should/could we have, and what we don't need);
- general reality issue ('realistic' cockpit visibility as a handicap).

Just a suggestion.

[horseback]

Originally Posted by Freelansir

I wasn't complaining about a darn thing, just pointing out a book that the author takes the time to include details flying a fighter.

No, I was the one who was complaining; I simply pointed out that the Anderson quote is inevitably brought up (usually from multiple posters) if anyone suggests that the current trim model of the Merlin powered P-51s is excessive.

There is a school of thought in the flight sim community that if it is harder, it must be more realistic; they also seem to think that newer, heavier and faster must also mean more complicated because that would mean harder to control (and therefore, more realistic). But the reality is that as technology becomes more advanced, it always becomes simpler and easier to use. Compare your DVD or DVR to the VHS systems I was using (at great expense, I might add) in the 1980s. The DVD/DVR is smaller, lighter, more energy efficient and much, much easier for you to operate.

While Anderson's book is very well written and generally accurate, that one sentence does not make the thousands of paragraphs and sentences written on the subject of trimming the Mustang before and since invalid, and most of the material on the subject says that the Mustang (like most later designs of that era) was better than its predecessors and most of its contemporaries because it was easier to fly and keep under control than the other fighters of its day, not just because it was merely faster and had longer range.

cheers

horseback

[RPS69]

Originally Posted by horseback

There is a school of thought in the flight sim community that if it is harder, it must be more realistic; they also seem to think that newer, heavier and faster must also mean more complicated because that would mean harder to control (and therefore, more realistic).

BIG LOL!!!

Also keep in mind, that almost all aircraft have been made strange by this particular perception of reality. This is not new to the sim, but it is nice when someone take the whole picture, and not just a biased one.

Still, all these discusions on aircraft performance, being it differential or not, start again every time a new patch appears, maybe with different actors, but it nevertheless starts again.

Tagert got a good tool to analyze this, while he still used that name. It enabled him to process other peoples tracks. With some help you could achieve many more test conditions, and got some in game behaviours faster, with the addition of joy inputs to discard player wrong inputs.

The trim retard was introduced because of some complain of cheating by people that love to play in horizontal furballs on dogfight servers. Nothing to do with reality.