See, that’s kind of my argument right there. The planes in 1918 were beyond “barely flying”. (The Camel really, really liked flying starboard, but it could not be qualified as “barely flying”).
The Parasol and the E.I – yeah, those things barely flew. But Immelmann did his eponymous turns in an aircraft barely better than either, the E.III. The DH2 was quite stable (to its detriment) and flew quite nicely. The Feeb looked like a six-year-old’s tinkertoy experience but flew into 1916 and beyond… and could be stunted.
The point here is that I believe the FC aircraft (and the entire 777/1C/DCS/rivet-counter community) have a shit idea of how planes should behave. Aircraft that fought their pilots constantly, required constant Fisher-Price BusyToy attention to knobs and fiddlers, and entered unrecoverable states at ridiculous levels – these tended to be weeded out in the testing stages, when they usually killed their test pilots.
I think it’s been forgotten that these aircraft were intended to be flown by 18-22 year olds, not the hoary old grogs flying the simulations of these aircraft.
Still, I’ll look at my controller settings, LOL :)
Flight testing hardly happened back then. Life was cheap. You either learn to control a highly unstable fighter or you don’t and then you die, get wounded or go back to the infantry. An 18-year old can get remarkably good at balancing very unstable things quickly. The camel and the Dr.1 was even worse, was dynamically unstable. In fact, almost as bad as an F-16 is. It needed constant care and attention. The pilot, with his lighting-fast 18-year-old reflexes did the work four computers do in the viper.
To me, the camel feels great in the 777 sim. But I’m a rivet counter I guess? I’m also more used to 21st century flight modelling, haven’t flown previous-gen in ages. Come on, old nukehead, git gud! at least you get to walk away from every pranged kite!
I only have about 10 hours flying real planes, but those range from a T-34 to an F-15D in addition to the civilian stuff, and I can tell you that the Maddox/777 stuff is way harder than flying real planes. Way too easy to get out of the safe flight envelope. Kids who grew up in IL-2 incorrectly believe planes enter death spins if you sneeze too far to one side.
That’s why I like WoFF and its “antiquated” flight-model. It seems to fit everything that I’ve been taught about WW1 buses:
Aircraft get tender and unresponsive as they approach their altitude/G/whatever limits, but won’t viciously snap you to your death if you pull an extra little G. They’ll generally just drop a wing and let you know, “nope, not gonna happen”. The snapping spin comes when you’re like, “no, I insist”, which makes sense. And then the resulting snap generally settles down when your respect the aircraft.
They take forever to alt, especially the earlier craft. Have a '15-'16 bus? Have fun taking a half-hour getting up to alt. The real boys had it worse. If their engine was bollox, which was often the case, 8,000 ft. was like over an hour. And they still did their patrol.
IL-2/FC’s “overheating fever” isn’t in WoFF. Jesus, people, I run my solid chunk of rotary whizz-bangery at 100% for like 2-3 minutes and I “damage the engine”? Somebody forgot to tell the systems modelling wizards at 777/1C that many WW1 engines ran at two settings: off, and full-on. And you generally didn’t blip the engine every 2-3 minutes to cool it off. (Oddly enough, WM and Pavlovsky did a 180 when modelling the engines in their WotR side-project… you have to babysit the engines there, too).
Both FC and WoFF understand these kites had like zero lift when you banked, and require judicious use of speed and rudder to keep the nose above the horizon… and that won’t last for long. Fights start high and inevitably go low.
To be fair, FC does one thing better than WoFF: overspeed shedding aircraft parts. WoFF’s damage model isn’t its strongest suit, and you know there’s something wrong when your E.III still has wings when it’s in a 130mph dive. They’re working on it.
In short, I feel that WoFF’s planes are willing to work with you if you don’t push them beyond their well-telegraphed limits. As opposed to, say, FC’s Camel, when I hopped in it last night and watched the airspeed follies, and then found myself in an unrecoverable flat spin with zip warning (and understanding in advance that hamfisting a Camel = death). I chuckled manfully, and then bopped over to the Dolphin, which pretty much did every unreasonable thing I asked of it. Hmm.
Welp, can’t argue with that. It aint perfect. Two scripted campaigns of 15-ish flights each can’t hold a candle to what WoFF offers either.
We miss a lot of feedback real pilots have in their kites. This makes it easy to miss out on ques telling us that we’re nearing the edge of the envelope. We can’t feel neither movement nor vibrations.
One of the things the 1C flight models are sensitive to is the onset of your control movement. If you smoothly and carefully stall it, it will not flat spin. If you suddenly drag the left wings back with full aileron, it’s going way out of its equilibrium and will bite. Perhaps it bites too hard, I don’t know, I haven’t been in and survived flying a real camel.
I did read they were tiring to fly, and dangerous to the uninitiated. This fits with my experience in the sim. Let’s not count rivets eh, just enjoy swirly-pew-pew in glorious VR!
Deadly as fuck in A-A, still slightly janky in A-G. Fiddling with target designations for smart weapons will cock up the navigation system. For now. Next patch is Nov. 4th.
I fly it a lot, enjoying CCIP delivery of retarded dumb bombs and CBU-97 and of course swatting bitches from the sky like a motherfucker.
Theres a flight in Syria instant action called the gauntlet. That one is great fun. A trench run, a CCIP delivery and back home in time for tea and medals.
But the real star of the show, for me, lately has been the A-10. They rereleased it. You can upgrade for a tenner if you own the old hog. You get two sweet gizmos for your latte; a helmet mounted sight that can point the target pod at shit and laser guided rockets that come at 7 per pod. You can zap trucks from angels 15 and murder like 50 trucks per load!
They also unfucked the hog flight model for all versions of it. About fucking time. It flies like a fighter now. Still slow but aggressive, no longer a bus. Unless you load ten tons of shit on it.
There’s a whole bunch of DCS World DLC on sale via Steam right now. Any particular favorites? I am looking at more maps. I have the A-10 planes only so far.
The sale’s also on at the DCS website. For folks who haven’t already invested in Steam purchases, it’s better to get DCS (and IL-2) directly from the publisher, as you get more frequent updates and sales. (Plus it helps support the sims better, since Steam doesn’t take a cut.)
I really like Supercarrier and the F/A-18, as well as the F-86 and MiG-15. The F-14 is really cool, though the whole RIO element makes it more complicated.
You can synch the Steam purchases over to the standalone so nothing is lost converting to direct. You do lose the ability to refund, but the developer has a rewards program (“miles”).
I ended up grabbing Supercarrier, the F/A-18, a couple of F/A-18 campaign modules, and the appropriate accessory!
On this page you can link a Steam account and import your purchases. It doesn’t automatically refresh, but you can re-sync if you forgot and purchased something from Steam directly later.
I’m not sure if this has been brought up before (I couldn’t see any mention recently), but I just saw a new game called Project Wingman which is releasing December 1st:
More on the arcade side of things perhaps, but it says it has HOTAS and VR support.
Project Wingman is very much in the “Ace Combat” school of gameplay, rather than anything approximating a sim. If the Kickstarter alpha (several years old at this point) and everything I’ve seen since are any indication, it will probably be a better game than AC7 was despite being made almost entirely by two people, though since it’s an Australian and an American the game should have a markedly different tone than an AC game.
