Why still no dive acceleration difference?

[FC99]

Originally Posted by Crumpp

Of course it is Fatcat. This is not the issue and completely irrelevant as to why your FM's would not exhibit any differences in dive acceleration. It does not answer the original poster's question.

Who says that there is no difference in dive acceleration. Whole premises in initial question is wrong. There is a difference in dive acceleration.

Take the force triangle for a dive. A component of weight contributes to thrust based on the angle of dive. The difference between the force on the axis of motion in the dive and the force on the axis of motion for level flight is your initial excess force that will move the aircraft to its new equilibrium point velocity. The derivative between that and equilibrium is your average excess force along that vector....

You are missing the point here, people want dive acceleration "fixed" as there is some magical switch that is turned on when plane start to dive but there is no such thing. All you have are Thrust, Lift,Drag and Weight acting on a plane no matter what's the plane attitude.

If you change something you will change plane behavior in all flight regimes not only in dive. If you have plane behavior modeled reasonably well in level flight and climb than there is no reason to believe that dive behavior is wrong.

Where game has its problems are extreme parts of flight envelope but that's not what the thread starter asked.


BTW Long ago I made tests and posted it on CWOS but it's lost now. But anybody can repeat it.It's simple.

1. Start the plane at alt above the initial testing point. Use no cockpit view to get TAS and stabilize the plane at desired TAS.

2. Keep the TAS constant and measure the time required to pass from the start altitude to end altitude.

3. Repeat for all planes you want to test, try it with no power and full power.

4. Compare the results.


As the test measure the time required to get from StartAlt to EndAlt it also measure the distance traveled. Test requirement is that TAS is kept constant so difference in time from let's say 4000m to 2000m will mean that planes passed different distances which in turn means that their diving angle was different.

Plane that needed longest to get to EndAlt is the best diving among the tested planes because it needed smallest help from gravity to keep its speed. Consequently it will dive fastest in a dive that is performed at same diving angle.