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Trek64Trek64
Posted

Okay, I had this problem with 1946  and it made me quit.  I don't quite get flight dynamics and need advice.  Here is what I mean.  I'm flying with full throttle and the AI zooms up to a higher altitude.  I try to zoom and my plane drops instead.   The second thing is turning.  I try to bank and turn with the enemy AI (also happened in multi with ROF years ago) and my plane shudders and drops into a spin.  It almost doesn't matter which plane I'm flying.  The point being, I don't know what to do to compensate.  Does adjusting the propeller help me climb?  Do I lower the angle or raise it?  What about mixture? I have no idea what to do with it.  There is no instruction manual for this sim just key mapping, but I don't know what some of the keys like propeller and mixture actually do.   I'm afraid to try multi until I can figure out how to climb like A.I. and use all these features.   Helpful advice would be much appreciated.

Posted

It’s pretty complex and all those things are factors. Max throttle and max prop rpm should get you the highest speed but every plane is very different.

 

i would suggest watching Requiems videos on YouTube. He goes over all the basics of engine management and how to manage the planes. Look up RequiemBOS on YouTube. ColNinny has a lot of good stuff too for principles of flight.  

 

Theres a lot to grasp as the sim is pretty close to real life, but don’t give up! It will become second nature eventually.

  • Like 2
  • Upvote 1
ShamrockOneFive
Posted

What I'm sensing is that basic flight controls is the current hangup. I wouldn't worry about things like engine management, mixture, supercharger stages, etc. just yet. This is going to be a process and it'll take some time to learn the basics and once you've mastered those then you start progressing through the rest of it.

 

The reason why flight simming is so appealing to me is that you can never truly master all of these things. You can only strive to be better than you were before.

 

Try going back to fundamentals:

https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Airplane_Flying_Handbook/Basic_flight_maneuvers

 

Without seeing you fly its hard to tell what's going on but you're probably applying too much angle trying to follow the AI through turns. Too much angle (this is the angle of attack) and you depart controlled flight.

 

When it comes to climb people tend to assume that its the angle that matters. But it's not. Especially true when you're dealing with a WWII aircraft which doesn't have more power than its weight (unlike say a clean F-15 which has more power than weight and can climb vertically). Focus on finding a mix between speed and angle so that your speed isn't decreasing but you are still climbing. How much depends on the aircraft in question, fuel weight, wing type, etc.

 

Flying requires a lot of finesse rather than brute force. If you're stalling it a lot... stop pulling back on the stick so much.

  • Upvote 2
Wolferl_1791
Posted (edited)

Each plane has a "best climb speed" usually around 270kph. If you pull up too much and drop below that speed, you'll actually climb slower, or stall.

 

For turning, the biggest issue is Angle of Attack. If you pull too hard on the joystick during a turn, you'll transform your wings into barn doors and your speed will decrease needlessly. Stall speed is also higher in a turn than it is in level flight. Also, assuming you are running at full RPM (which you most surely are), then the gyroscopic effects of the propeller will cause you problems during sudden direction changes, such as in a turn. If you pull suddenly on the joystick, you'll spin all over the place. Be gentle and use progressive movements. 

 

Mixture is easy to explain, it's the ratio between air/fuel that goes into your engine. The higher you go, the less dense air becomes, so the engine suffocates if you use full mixture. You will notice a decrease in manifold pressure (or maybe RPM, if you're using manual pitch) . As you decrease mixture, you increase the air and the MP goes up. If you have more fuel than optimal, the engine runs slightly cooler. If you have more air, the engine runs hotter. This usually means that at high altitude, where it's VERY cold, you actually want a bit more air than normal. So decrease mixture until you get maximum RPM and it begins to drop back again.Also, you lose less fuel so your range increases. However, IL-2 doesn't care a lot about mixture, since it was mostly automated on warbirds. The Germans fully automate it. The Russians also automate it but allow you to decrease it for fuel saving. On some planes you engage Boost mode by setting mixture to full. The simulator doesn't feature engine clogging at full mixture or hotspot blow-outs at low mixture so you don't need to worry about those long term issues.

 

This sim doesn't really need a manual, as it's way more beginner friendly than figuring out how to fly a Cessna in any civil sim. But by "beginner" I mean "someone who knows the difference between a controllable-pitch propeller and a constant-speed propeller". The info-cards are usually all we need, plus to figure out where the instruments are. I've never crashed a plane on my first flight with it. In my first ever career flight in an I-16 I even got a kill or two without knowing where the altimeter was (slight exaggeration). However I've been flying civ planes in sims since 1994. So you do need to read a bit elsewhere. I suggest the awesome manuals of Flight Unlimited 1/2/3 and Falcon 4, which deal with a lot of generic information. Don't let the 700+ pages fool you, just read about how to do the basic maneuvers such as turns. Also, learn engine controls in a Cessna 182, which is much harder than a Mig 3. The good old MS Flight Simulator is still the go-to-place for its amazing Flight School and it's just 24 bucks on Steam. Or, you know... cheat by watching it on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TYxQB2hHFs

 

 

Edited by Wolferl_1791
  • Like 1
=EXPEND=Dendro
Posted

Try be more specific....what plane are you flying and what plane is the AI? Some climb MUCH better than others so no matter how well you climb in a yak or a lagg a 109G2/f4 WILL catch you. If you in a 109 e7 a yak will out turn you in a sustained turn.

 

Try out a scenario and we will tell you what you are doing right or wrong. 

Posted

You need a gentle touch on that stick for most flight manoeuvres to maximise your energy retention. Exception being when you are hard evasive, but even here you will rarely use full control deflection.

 

When you feel that shudder, a stall or spin is about to follow, you need to ease off a bit, or try to ride the edge of the flight envelope. Also keep an eye on your turn and slip indicator. Ideally you want to keep the ball as close to centre as possible. If you do not keep it centred you will bleed energy, potentially giving your opponent an energy advantage.

  • Like 1
Posted

My advice would be: Don't bite too much at once for starters. Go and train in a Spit IX or La5FN vs Bf 110E. Once you can cosistently shoot him down, bring the game up with harder opponent. Soon you'll be able to fight similar opponents on eaual terms. ?

-TBC-AeroAce
Posted

Sounds like OP may not have rudder control set up.

Posted

You need to get informed on how these airplanes work, it seems to me you are quite new to flight in general. Getting acquainted with general flight basics will vastly increase your ability to operate any of the planes. You can't just zoom up like a rocket ship, and you can't just pull back and turn as hard as you want, these things will usually end badly for you. Check out youtube to get some knowledge on how things work. There is no tutorial in game unfortunately as you have already discovered.

 

https://www.youtube.com/user/RequiemBoS

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  • Upvote 2
Posted
11 minutes ago, Remontti said:

Here is link to game manual

 

Unfortunately that link has been broken for a while now I think.

Posted
6 hours ago, dburne said:

 

Unfortunately that link has been broken for a while now I think.

Uh, my bad. Sorry about that.

+1 for checking out Requiems videos.

1./KG4_ArthurMimo
Posted (edited)
On 8/13/2018 at 2:59 AM, Trek64Trek64 said:

Okay, I had this problem with 1946  and it made me quit.  I don't quite get flight dynamics and need advice.  Here is what I mean.  I'm flying with full throttle and the AI zooms up to a higher altitude.  I try to zoom and my plane drops instead.   The second thing is turning.  I try to bank and turn with the enemy AI (also happened in multi with ROF years ago) and my plane shudders and drops into a spin.  It almost doesn't matter which plane I'm flying.  The point being, I don't know what to do to compensate.  Does adjusting the propeller help me climb?  Do I lower the angle or raise it?  What about mixture? I have no idea what to do with it.  There is no instruction manual for this sim just key mapping, but I don't know what some of the keys like propeller and mixture actually do.   I'm afraid to try multi until I can figure out how to climb like A.I. and use all these features.   Helpful advice would be much appreciated.

 

 

 

As others have said maybe it's best if you don't focus on the engine and propeller just yet - from your description it sounds as though you might misunderstanding some more general things. Without instruction it's easy to get a wrong impression of how things work and hit a wall. This might be happening to you and it's absolutely normal if you are learning something by yourself. 

 

 

 

You say that you zoom and your plane drops instead. Aircraft need speed to fly, incoming air pressing under the wings und pulling the plane up against gravity. The force generated by your wings is your aircraft's lift, and it counteracts gravity. Having lift - and by extension, speed - is crucial: if you slow down too much, your wings and control surfaces will no longer have enough air pressure to work with. Your plane becomes sluggish. Similarly, if you pull your nose up, not only will you fight against gravity directly, your lift will also no longer directly oppose gravity. Hence, you slow down. As you slow down, you come to a point where the aircraft can no longer maintain its steep climb angle. It will drop. This is called a stall. Typically, during the fall you'll pick up speed and the controllability of your plane improves. Or technically speaking, during the fall you'll pick up airspeed, which will create a lift force that enables you to climb and maneuver again. The solution is speed. And the patience to pick up that speed. What you described sounds like this. Generally if you want to make a maneuver such as loopings or steep climbs, depending on the plane I'd recommend being at speeds of 400 km/h or higher. 

 

 

You also describe that when you turn, your plane shudders and then spins. This is precisely what happens when you stall out during a turn. Initially you have enough speed to make the turn, but as you turn you bleed speed. The lift that you generate gradually gets smaller and at some points drops below a value that allows you to maintain your path. The controls will become sluggish, the plane will need increasingly stronger force to be kept on path, and ultimately it'll stall and/or spin. The cure is to retain more speed and go lighter on the controls - you're likely just overdoing it. What both the stalls during climb and turning indicate is that you need to keep a close eye on your speed. These planes can't always afford every maneuver and often you have to build up kinetic energy (in the form of speed, altitude, or ideally, both) to be able to afford a prolonged series of maneuvers. Aside from speed, many people also pull on the stick way harder than they need to or the plane can do. For instance, I've managed to spin out a FW190 at speeds exceeding 400 km/h I think. Be as gentle as you can afford on the stick.

 

 

My recommendation would be to play in a way that does not require any engine management at all for now and focus on the pure joy of flying. You might use normal difficulty (has automatic engine management) or fly something like the 109s, as their engines  practically work themselves. This allows you to focus solely on flying. Or the Yak 1, where you only have to control mixture and radiators (just set it to rich and keep the radiators open for the beginning). For a 109, the ideal maneuvering speed is thought to be at around 270km/h, so try to not go under that level. This is also the speed at which they climb best. Try to figure which climb angle keeps your speed at 270km/h. Every angle steeper than that can only be maintained briefly, or if you have a higher speed.

 

Others have suggested to watch the tutorials by Requiem. I wholeheartedly agree. Requiem is absolutely not an annoying YouTuber and he keeps his videos on the point. All of them are very instructional and will help you. It is also absolutely okay to ask for someone to spar with you a bit in multiplayer. 

 

 

 

 

Edited by 1./KG4_ArthurMimo
  • Like 2
216th_Jordan
Posted (edited)

What I haven't seen mentioned too often is Adverse Yaw and engine torque.

 

A rotating engine with prop will cause the plane to slip or skid in a turn (gyroscopic effect - the effect is determined by rotation direction and the direction of an airplane's turn), this means that the aircrafts fuselage is not parallel to the plane of turn, one wing is ahead of the other. The wing with the lower speed and/or the wing who is turned away from the incoming airflow will stall earlier resulting in a spin immediately  rather than a normal stall on both wings at almost the same time that develops into a spin. If you are in a properly coordinated turn you will get the most lift and the tightest turn radii. Make sure to watch the slipping ball in the instrument panel and try to keep it in center using rudder input.

 

Same is true for rolls, if you use the ailerons you will need to add a bit of rudder into the direction of roll to compensate for adverse yaw resulting from the drag difference of upward vs downward aileron.

Edited by 216th_Jordan
Posted

Would it be possible to record some of your flying? It would help tremendously to pinpoint the problems and correct them.

 

From your writing, you seem new to flight simming in general. Welcome to the game, it's a never-ending learning process. I'm making an assumption here and say: "You were trying to always keep the crosshair on your target". Is that correct?

 

Because if yes, that's a very common mistake newcomers make (myself included back in the days). You should read up on Lag, Pure and Lead Pursuit and understand the concepts:

TA7.jpg

 

To explain what happens to you: Both you and your opponent are in a turn. He is turning as best as he can. If you now try to put your crosshair on him, you will, by rules of geometry, have to fly a tighter turn than he does. And turning tighter means you're burning more energy (aka, speed) in most situations. With you burning speed faster than he does, you'll end up without it quicker and you will stall (in other words, he has outplayed you). That's why when you turn fight, you want to assume a lag pursuit as much as possible and only go lead or pure for taking a shot. Depending on what you and your opponent are flying, even lag pursuit can still have you loose energy quicker than he does, so it's all very dependent on what planes are involved. Same concept applies to climbing/zooming. The better climbing plane will lose less energy doing it than the other. Who loses too much energy stalls. Climbing and zooming are a bit different in so far that no plane outclimbs a bullet. But you can imagine the lower plane pointing its nose very steeply into the sky at an opponent as a sort of lead pursuit situation. High energy loss for a chance to get a shot in. High risk, high reward play.

In all of this, imagine a dogfight less of getting your crosshair on target and rather as a wrestling match. You try to wrestle your opponent out of energy, ideally before you run out of it. Once he has no more of it, you pull your gun and finish the affair. The killing shot is just the inevitable conclusion of everything that happened before it. The actual fight that decides the outcome normally happens before the killing shot.

 

Okay, so much for the dogfighting theory, now to the machine handling:

You seem confused about prop pitch, mixture and manifold pressure (hg,map, pound, ata, whatever unit it's measured in). General rule: The higher everything is, the more power and speed you get out of it (aka, the more energy it generates). RPM and map should always be adjusted in relation to each other (technically, when going for more power, increase RPM and follow with map. When reducing power, reduce map then reduce RPM). Second general rule: The higher everything is, the quicker your engine heats up and too hot means your engine dies. You can counter heating up by opening your radiators (oil, intake, outlets, water, whatever you plane has under your control. Some are pure automatic and you don't have to deal with it like many German planes). But opening radiators means you incur more drag and drag means your maximum possible speed goes down. Now you can tell you have this complicated balancing act, adjusting potential speed/energy, cooling and heat generation. The experienced players usually flip sharply between these aspects, dropping cooling and peaking heat generation for a short while to gain a lot of energy generation for a situation like a tight turning dogfight or a zoom climb. Then when they're out in a clear, they buffer cooling, dropping the engine heat as much as they can so they have more time available during which they can run their engine at max performance without risking to blow it.

As a rule of thumb: Every plane has specific maximum temperatures for their engines. You can read them up in the manual and the descriptions of the planes in game. If you have tech chat on in game, you will notice the info saying that you're running your engine at "continuous" or "combat" or "emergency". Continuous is the only setting at which the engine will not fail after a specific time. Combat is usually restricted to a rather wide time frame, 20-30 minutes I think. Emergency is really that: Only short bursts, normally limited to 1 to 5 minutes depending on plane. BTW: these timeframes are not just tied to temperature, damage can also occur from mechanical wear. So don't think you can continue running the emergency because your temps are still good.

And the last thing: Mixture is the richness of the fuel/air mixture that gets blown up on your pistons/cylinders. Rule of thumb: There's an optimum ratio of fuel to air at which you get the best explosion and the better the explosion, the more oomph gets put behind the prop, the more power your engine puts out. You need to know how your specific plane is set up. Most planes use automatic mixtures where always the optimum mix is used. Others have something like a gear shift, where you have rich and lean automatics. Rich is for combat and performance, lean is for fuel conservation but becomes quickly insufficient once you open the throttle too much (indicated by the engine sputtering). Others like the IL2 and the Mig3 have a hybrid where up to 50% mixture, you have a lean manual, at 50 you have a sort of automatic rich and at ~80%, you have a WEP like setting. If you have a full manual mixture, you need to adjust your mixture while looking at your RPM. Increase mixture so long as RPM increases and stop increasing once RPM decreases again. Generally, the higher you climb, the less rich your mixture becomes as less and less air is available. Pumping more fuel into the mix won't increase performance then and you end up with partially burned fuel getting blown out of your exhausts pipes (aka bad).

 

I hope this clears some of your confusion. This is all complicated stuff and every plane is sadly a new thing to learn. So try not to jump around between the planes, go for 2, maybe 3 and master them first, then expend.

Trek64Trek64
Posted

My thanks to everyone who took the time to respond. This is a very helpful forum.  Actually, I am not totally new to flight sims. I go all way back to the very first MS Flight Simulator and military sims like the original Red Baron, Flight of the Intruder, the first Falcon, and even F-A Interceptor on the Commodore Amiga 500,  which came out when some of you guys were probably in Elementary School. I"m old. I've owned ROF (had the same problem with that sim).  I currently own P3D v.4.2 with a ton of ORBX add-ons, and WOFF Champagne Edition.    So, I'm not new to flight sims just flight SIMMING.  In other words, I always fly on "easy" settings to try to recapture the most fun I've ever had in single or multiplayer:  the old Janes Combat Flight Sims, like F-15 and WWII, and MS Combat Flight Simulator 1 and 2.  I don't like pure arcade flight games because they are too unrealistic, but I've never been able to dedicate the time to learn complex engine management that is required to fly high fidelity sims at the most realistic settings.  That is why I don't do multiplayer anymore (I just get shot down because I can't climb and zoom like everyone else).  I'm ready to give up on DCS for just that reason.  Yes, I have DCS World 2.5.  Perhaps "sim-lite" is more my thing. Something between arcade and detailed hard core sims.  But they don't make those anymore.  Janes is gone.  MS Combat Sims are gone. Microprose is gone.  Heck, Spectrum Holobyte (the original Falcon) is gone.

 

I will study Requiem's videos as most of you have advised.  Thank  you.  

Posted

I did some flying way back with Battle of Britain and Secret weapons of Luftwaffe. In IL-2 Forgotten battles I had zero idea about energy preservation or how to utilize effectively different aircraft. Just turning and hoping best.

 

Got interested again with RoF and BoS I decided to learn engine management and play multiplayer. These forums have been a ton of help. I might suggest that you don't try to learn all aircraft at once. Pick few and go with them. When you're comfortable with them then study new ones.

 

There is lot to learn, but for me that is what keeps this interesting. And in multiplayer it can be very rewarding when you eventually get success despite all the difficulties. 

Posted
5 hours ago, Remontti said:

There is lot to learn, but for me that is what keeps this interesting.

 

Even now after a lets say "modest" amount of hours played in this sim, I find I am still discovering subtle things I didn't notice before. 

1./KG4_OldJames
Posted

The replies to this post serve to demonstrate how il2 is a simulator and not an arcade shoot-em-up game.

Posted

For the basics, learn to fly the Yak-1. It might be the most reasonable to learn and fly, take off with - and has capability...then I wouldn't worry about mixture starting out

 

What stick are you using. Is your Trim and RPM on there? Do you use a throttle?  Yes, you definitely need to adjust your RPM and Throttle in tandem without overheating. Very fun to learn once you get the hang of it.  ( like driving a car in 3rd gear on the freeway if not set up) ...also your trim needs to be adjusted on the fly - (like having your foot on the brake on freeway)

 

TRIM-RPM-THROTTLE 

 

get those simple mechanisms down and you'll be fast...definitely play with the trim with the hud on to see whats happening.

 

 dont get too upset.  Ive probably flown 1000 hours since 1946 ..and will still manage burn up a p40 engine by not paying enough attention..

 

great sim. 

 

 

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