True Altitude?

[Soldier_Fortune]

Originally Posted by Jeremiah_Weed

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Conclusion: YES...flight paths from bombs ARE being manipulated in IL-2 and are NOT following the rules of classical mechanics.

Hi J_W!

May be you have discovered a more elemental game's feature: the in-game's time would pass more slowly than IRL.

Don't worry: this has nothing to do with Stephen Hawking or the Theory of the Relativity.

But there would be some practical reasons for such delay.
In any case, we should apply the following basic rules of thumb:

- Never use other than a sim's in-game clock to measure their internal times.
- Never use other than a sim's in-game ruler to measure their internal distances.
- Never use other than a sim's in-game protractor to measure their internal angles.
- Never use other than a sim's in-game guages to measure their internal magnitudes and quantities.

Because a sim is an approximate model of a part of Reality, but it is not Reality.

In order to the above, before making a jugdment about whether the bombs' flight path are being internally manipulated or not, we should check if the game's clocks are sinchronized with those of the real world or not.

The delays you've observed are +6% over the calculated theoretical time, and that percentage remains almost constant regardless of the altitude.
That means adding 0.06 s (or 60 ms) every elapsed second. It's like as if an in-game electromagnetic wave of 60 Hz was seen as a wave of 13 Hz IRL.
And the same could be applied to every physical magnitude within the sim... if the developers have decided to apply it.

It is easier to establish an intencional delay (for whatever technical reason), than to introduce specific constants which in turn depend of certain conditions. The last demands many more calculations and resources, and it's more difficult to tune: this would be the case for such "bombs' path manipulation".
But the time must be the same for each "universe", and it would be easier to handle for a "fine tunning of the IL-2 universe" by their developers.

I would like to do an experiment about your data, but I can't come home yet. Thus I'll beg you to do the following test, please:

1) Design any bomb mission, and place a static camera near to the target.

2) You must use the onboard clock (instead an external stop watch) to measure the time it takes for the bomb to hit the ground (the He-111 would be a good choice: this aircraft has a clock just in front on the player offering them a complete and clear view of it. This clock counts seconds).

3) Play the mission. Drop your bomb when you're ready, and immediately pause the game.

4) Read the drop instant with the aircraft's clock, and hit the "camera view", and gather all the in-flight data with the gauges (not the speedbar): altitude, IAS, OATs, variometer, how much elevator trim is applied if the autolevel is engaged.

5) Unpause the game and be ready to pause the game again when the bomb hits the ground.

6) Jump to the cockpit and read the clock again.

7) The difference between the two readings is the bomb's flying time within the IL2 universe.

With the onboard clock you cannot measure times shorter than 1 second; but it should be sufficient to measure differences of 2 seconds.

Other experiment might be to measure a longer lapse (i.e.: 2 or 3 minutes) simultneously with both the aircraft clock and your stop watch, to see how long is that "IL2 universe" lapse when it is compared with the RL.

It's not relevant if that time matches or not the RL time, while all the other variables are consistent with that. If that consistency was verified, the Mechanical Laws would remain applicable within IL2.

But if not... Then I should review all my calculations to find why the laws of Classical Mechanics seems to work well for manual targeting.

Please: if you carry on such experiment, let me know your data, outcomes and what map you've used.