Hey TD can you look again at the Corsair..

[horseback]

Originally Posted by EJGr.Ost_Caspar

Somehow I suspect, you are talking about 'perfect trim' (as you needed it for your acceleration tests). I do triming only by 'feel' and the way it is done in Il-2 gives me a 'good trim' without problems. On acceleration, when nose wants to come up and plane wants to shift, I counter it with the stick (forward and rudder), then I apply some tapping of elevator trim down and rudder (if possible) and meanwhile slowly release the stick (watching the reticle keeping the same place at the horizon). Thats somewhat near to what pilots did back then and works very well. Watching the plane (and the ball) is my best indicator. Mostly I don't even need the ball to tell, how I have to trim in turns. Maybe I'm just extraordinary sensitive.

I doubt, pilots in WW2 where so eager to find always the correct trim by scale (this only for starts or landings maybe).

In short - I can not re-experience your difficulties.


EDIT: I don't see a problem for wonder woman view though. But for the sim I would rather like to live without even more neon flickering hud messages.

Most WWII fighter pilots also trimmed by 'feel'; the one on the seat of their pants. If you felt yourself sliding a bit to the left, you added a bit of right rudder trim; if you felt yourself being pressed back into your seat, you rolled the elevator trim wheel forward a bit to achieve level (and efficient) flight and relieve the pressure on your stick. Those feelings are not present in the game, along with the obvious advantages of a clear and (consistently) accurate instrument panel, full peripheral vision and inputs for the inner ear.

Now, for many of the aircraft modeled in Il-2 '46, this is not a great problem; their FMs are derived from 70 year old test reports, a modern physics model applied to ideal airframes and powerplants coupled with the vivid imaginations of the programmers, so an aircraft described as being light on the controls and easily trimmed needs a consistent (and small) set of up, down, left or right clicks of trim to settle the ball and establish flight speed at almost every speed. Even aircraft known to be very demanding of trim inputs (like the P-40 and the P-39 for example) are given a relatively forgiving trim model. And we don't even address stuff like landing behavior, which would lead to conservatively, at least two thirds of the 109 and P-40 landings ending in disaster (among other aircraft--but these two would draw the most complaints).

However, there is another class of aircraft that has a rather extensive modern set of data, which is measured by the modern standard: the late war US fighters, the Spitfire to some degree, and I suspect, the FW 190 series, now that 1:1 scale replicas are on hand and the findings from their flights are being widely published. In my ten plus years' experience with this game, in these aircraft, the trim adjustments do not result in a steadily decreasing pressure on my joystick's springs as I struggle to maintain level flight or even a relatively well trimmed state; instead, the aircraft will suddenly go up or down once the trim level exceeds the ideal (and I do not hold the button down--I tap it just as you and Luno have repeatedly described). While WWII era reports tell us that these aircraft were easy to trim and that their controls were generally light and well balanced (even more so than most of the reports of other WWII era fighters that are given, shall we say, more optimistic trim models), we know that by today's modern standards, they were more demanding than modern jets with boosted controls or the average modern civilian general aviation aircraft with less than a quarter the horsepower and even less proportional payload capacity, packed with every modern convenience and engineering miracle to make the pilot/purchaser's task easier.

What a shock. To think that men who were picked from the cream of their nations' youth for their physical fitness and intelligence in an era when so much more work was done with human muscle power might find the same stick and rudder forces you or I might find objectionable to be 'light', or that more extensive trim inputs would be required from the peak of the aircraft engineering and design in 1942 compared to the modern commercial light aviation standards of the 21st century, or that of supersonic jets that don't have to deal with stuff like propellers and torque, much less p-factor.

However, the trim behaviors of these aircraft are clearly more consistent with somewhat exaggerated modern reports rather than with the reports of the WWII tests and pilots' impressions and the instruments also appear to be judged by more modern standards, if the gross inaccuracies of the late-war Western fighter's instrument panels in the game are compared to the game's depictions of more accurate readings from earlier generation British & American instruments in the Hurricane, Spitfire Mk V, the P-39 and P-40 series fighters. And then the game's advocates claim that they are merely catering to the demand for 'accuracy'.

In-game, this clearly saps a lot of the power and performance of this group of late war aircraft the moment they enter into common combat maneuvers, because even minor imperfections in trim result in extra drag penalties (which to me seem somewhat excessive and would go a long way towards explaining why the Mustang has so much better acceleration than the P-38 and the paddleblade-equipped P-47D-27, when the historical record says that all three were fairly close and that the P-38 had the best level acceleration of the group). Add in the rather odd behaviors in trim response that I found at certain speed ranges (and at the first application of full power with the so-called heavies) and it becomes very difficult to reconcile the in-game behaviors of these fighters to wartime reports. It simply becomes very difficult to trim to rapidly changing conditions because the penalties seem to me to be both out of proportion and hard to make sense of and anticipate.

Rather than completely redoing these aircraft's FMs, I think the quick fix is to at least let the pilot of the high-trim fighters be able to see their current trim state as it changes, and possibly to re-work some of the instruments' depictions to a common standard of readability and accuracy in Wide view.

cheers

horseback

PS: Yes, I know that I'm asking someone else to do extra uncompensated work