S3 Series

<S> all.
The criticical dive speeds where the aircraft starts to take damage is slowly being reworked for all flightmodels. This means they will generally break at a lower speed than people are used to. This will bring our fighters closer to real world limitations, as the flightmodels in Warbirds have for many years been able to dive at unhistorically high speeds, and most of them have even had incorrect limits relative to eachother. The new limits have been set so that flightmodels will break at 5-12% above their historical limitations. i.e. the Bf 109's had a limit of 466 mph IAS at 10 000 ft, so in Warbirds it will break at ~488 mph IAS. Make sure you test any S3 plane before the event to know it's new limits.

The airplanes which have recieved updates so far are:
Maximum speed (indicated) above which the flightmodels risk taking damage:

Bf 109's: 466 mph IAS
Fw 190A's: 466 mph IAS
P-47D: 520 mph IAS
P-51D: 505 mph IAS
Typhoon: 525 mph IAS
Hurricane 390 mph IAS


<S>
/Robert

Thank you and all the others involved for your time spent in "diving" into all this

A big <S>

Swede- 416 RCAF

Robert getting reports of 190s not being able to make 28000ft in alt. Any testing done on thes that you can post?

SUMMARY
After running tests today, I see no indication of the Fw 190A-4 or A-8 being unable to get above 28 000 ft. Do note that if flying with droptanks or whatnot one cannot expect to reach the AC's service ceiling. Especially the A-8 is a heavily overburdened airframe, cramped with guns and ammo with a weight high above the original design intentions of the Focke-Wulf. Also do note that the Fw 190A series has not yet been revised, and has only recieved a quick engine update.

Service ceilings reached in my tests:
Fw190A-4 fllown at light weight: 36 000 ft
Fw190A-8 flown at a heavy weight: 32 000 ft


DISCUSSION
It's a bit more helpful if they give more details next time. What boost setting? What climbspeed? What fuel state etc etc? It's also quite helpful if people would go test percieved "errors" to see wether it is really an error or was just due to a human mistake/misconception. I don't really fancy reports from knee-jerk reactions, as it takes 1-3 hours of my sparetime to go run these kind of tests and respond. I'll happily run tests as long as there is a detailed description of a probable bug though, as player feedback is invaluable for finding errors in the flightmodels.

I hope the players who failed to get above 28k used at minimum bst1 Dauerleistung 1.20 ata (max continous) or even better bst2 kampfleistung 1.32 ata (military), since 100% throttle is pretty much max cruise settings and not suitable for climbing.


MY TESTS TODAY
Regarding the Fw 190 climb performance it's important to keep a reasonable climbspeed. Climbing at like 110-120 mph isn't going to do well with a radial engine, which is solely dependant on airflow for cooling.

I used the climbspeeds of:
0-10k: 165 mph IAS
11-20k: 160 mph IAS
21-30k: 155 mph IAS
30k+: 150-135 mph IAS

I made the test with both light- and very heavy aircraft weights:
1) Fw 190A-4 at 50% fuel. (8136 lb - mid fight condition)
2) Fw 190A-8 at 100% fuel. (9825 lb - quite overburdened aircraft).

The result is shown in the diagram below. As can be seen the Fw 190A-4, at bst2 1.32 ata, holds a climb rate of more than 1000 ft/min at 30 000 ft, and has a ceiling of 36 000 ft. As such I'm at a loss as to why these pilots couldn't climb above 28 000 ft.





Cheers!
/Robert

Thanks Robert <{S}>

Only thing I can think is S3 FM versus offline FM. You know the typical login S3 arena and then exit and login in free flight arena. Just a thought.

Robert here is some feed back from the Axis side who flew the 190A8. It's a quote from the frame 1 AAR. <{S}>

"Just a note about the 190-A8 from our perspective:

I believe this was about the same results that the other 190 squad had.

AC PERFORMANCE NOTE:
FW 190 A-8 could not perform well enough to be effective at the altitude of the bomber attack at 28k+.
We had to get rid of our drop tanks much earlier than we wanted to just to gain altitude.
In order to get to 29K and maintain altitude, we had to use boost 2 constantly, burning through fuel too fast as well as overheating the engine. We would drop to 100% T for cooling, and lose 2-3k in altitude immediately.
Many could not even reach 30K, which seemed to be the ceiling for that aircraft. I believe this should actually be around 37K. (just from minimal research I did on 190 a8)
By the time we made it to the BG, we could only catch them at co alt, with a very slow closure rate, thus exposing us to the guns and otto for too long, not to mention hanging us out to dry against the escorts."

Rgr Jugggo. I think this is a side effect with the current boost stages. In real life at high altitude the power curve for WEP/military/max continous etc would start to blend together, and the higher you go the lower the manifold pressure avaliable. In Warbirds this would mean that when climbing the bst3 stage should slowly decrease until equal to bst2's percentage the closer you get to bst3's critical altitude, then both bst3 and bst2 start to get equal to bst1, and they'll then all slowly decrease down to 100% the higher you go, meaning that overheating would no longer be an issue at high enough altitude. Do note this is only my speculation and I'm not in any way the expert regarding this subject.

I believe that Dawger might have actually started to model the flightmodels this way now, as I've seen this is the way the throttle now works for the Hawker Typhoon for example. The Fw 190's engine however still has the old way of boost settings, and recoding all FM's will take hours upon hours of work. Also Dawger is on a 1 month vacation and I don't think there is anyone else who can, or want to put in the amount of time needed to make any tweaks until then. I frankly don't know if he will even come back after the vacation with all the namecalling and false accusations of bias which he's had to endure and with the stagnation of Main Arena improvements despite all suggestions made. We can only hope.


<S>
/Robert

My machine happens to indicate that the FM in "Free Flight" is 2037.

FWIW, it takes a bit of time to do any S3 flight test. Sometime ago, when it took a whole B-24's worth of bombs to take down a radar emitter when testing in "Free Flight", I learned that it was best to check the FM in use prior to spending the time required to do the tests.

The "magic string" is: .echo @MODSVERSION@
The buffer will respond with the "fl" in use.

OFFLINE, if you don't get the number you are looking for:

.fldat flxxxx (where xxxx is number of the file eg .fldat fl2037) will deliver any "fl" file that you have stored in your system. Typically, "fl" files are overwritten each time one UPDATES. Who makes what "fl" file available in FREE FLIGHT, or when, is unknown to me.

Just logged into the S3 arena and checked the fl there, it is 2037. Went off line into free flight and checked, it was also 2037 fwiw.
Don't know where the discrepancy can be found, unless there are other file(s) that have been tweaked for S3 play only. Dunno

<S>

Shouldn't be any arena changes which can affect the Flight Model performance (other than easy mode enable).

If it is 2037 it is 2037.

Wolf, the exe file dictates the default FL file to use.

Best bet is to hop into S3 arena, then hop out to free flight mode. You keep all the S3 arena settings that way.

Cheers!

Dobs