Hubbabubba crashes big time!

[hubbabubba]

Hi to you all!

Thursday's night - Friday's morning, the PC crashed totally.

I was able to make some rescuing disks but I do not know how much was saved, if any...:hatchet: ?

All messages were lost, anything send between Thursday evening up to now must be consider lost too.

I had my moments of discouragement, take my word for it, but its getting better. On the bright side, we now have a 80Gb HD with almost nothing on it.

It will take me 2 to 3 days to reinstall and salvage what I can. My e-mail account was just reinstalled minutes ago but may still go off-line, so DO NOT SEND ME ANY E-MAIL for now as they may be lost.

I will keep you posted.

Ivan - you are, once again, the only possessor of my Taifun for now, don't loose it!

Dunbar - will come back to you but, for now, ask for Ivan. You may have found a way to change, by accident, the POV of stock a/c, one of the Holy Grail of CFS1!

DieStaffel - Its your joystick (or yoke) as Guppanui says.

Hubbabubba signing off... for now

[womble55]

Don't touch the old hard drive, fit the new one and install everything you can then fit the old one as a slave drive (change the jumper pins on the back). Windows should recognise the old drive as an extra drive so you can then bleed off all you need to continue. Good luck!

[Ivan]

Hi Hubbabubba,
Let me know what you want me to send back to you. Keep in mind though that I do not have the AFX that you did all the mods to. I did some more poking around in your AIR file over the weekend, but with the current situation, that can wait until your project is recovered.

- Ivan.

[hubbabubba]

Hi Ivan!

After the breakdown I was able to make image files of the HD in DOS mode and it looks like I will be able to salvage most of my work.

Hi womble55!

Thanks for the advice. If I had had a chance to read it before formatting HD it would have work. But, as you can read just over, imaging saved my behind. I had no idea of the extent of damage to it so I took no chance. Cost me about 18 CD's though!

Thank you both

Hubbabubba
P.S.- Add 2 or 3 days to the 2 or 3 days already passed.

[Ivan]

Hi Hubbabubba,
I just emailed the revised Taifun AIR file to you. I will attempt a summary of what I found that I considered unusual. (....in no particular order)
All airspeeds will be indicated vs true.

1. Rudder effect reverses itself just past 200 knots.

2. Section 546 - Roll Rate Reduction. This table is missing from the AIR file. I consider it fairly important for fighter simulations. As an example, a P-47 does not roll particularly well normally, but under G-load, it loses less of its roll rate than some other fighters.

3. I forgot to mention that I increases the Landing Gear crash factor which really does not affect flight characteristics.

4. I further reduced the Flap drag coefficient down to 0.041. It originally was 0.12. See if you like this better.

5. Section 1101 -- Roll Damping. I changed this from -942 to -1850 which reduced the roll rate a bit. It still rolls quite quickly, but seems a bit more reasonable.

6. Engine seems to stall with low throttle settings in aerobatics. I have no idea what might be causing this. I have never tested a plane with a fixed pitch prop to this extent.

7. Section 1204 - I changed dihedral from 2 degrees to 6 degrees which is what your visual model shows. Dihedral effect in section 1101 is raised from 48 to 120.

8. Section 517 Elevator - Aircraft loses just about all elevator effect at 230 knots and above.

9. For Propeller animation, Max RPM appears to be 2000. Propeller blades becom transparent only at 1950 RPM and above.

10. Section 316 Mach Limit - Was at 0.89. I reset this to 0.35 but I don't believe it actually affects anything.

11. Section 320 - Controls - All control deflections are 0.3839 Radians which seems a bit strange.

12. Section 341, 342, 343 - All control effectiveness with deflection graphs are completely linear which seems unusual also.

13. Section 500, 505 - Max HP is set at 237. I believe this only controls the engine sound volume. I would recommend setting this a bit lower so that full sound volume is maintained for longer.

14. Section 404 - CL Graph is modified to reduce CL above 28 degrees or so and give greater stall effects.

15. I changed the text slightly in Sections 2 & 3 for description.

16. Section 330 - Propeller - I am a bit curious as to why you chose a fixed pitch prop when this plane also had a variable pitch available.

17. Section 1004 - Landing gear is listed as steerable. Is this correct? I would have expected a castoring tail wheel.

- Ivan.

[hubbabubba]

Hi Ivan!

I saw your e-mail in my account but didn't do anything with it as my system is still quite unstable. This evening, while attempting to make new partition on the two HD, I almost lost it and was only saved by Partition Magic's rescue diskettes.

You have been pretty thorough in your analysis and I am eager to see, and "feel", your air file. It's 1 o'clock and I'm pretty tired but I will take a few seconds to get back at some comments you made.

1- 200 kts = ? Km. Remember that my measurement converter is somewhere on a HD waiting to be resucitated. If it is over 350 Km or so, good! The Taifun was one of the most studied non-military a/c of the pre-war period. It was determined that, pass 315 Km/h, vibrations were sharply curving down its maneuverability characteristics. Reversed rudder effect would fit the description. But I was not per se trying to get that effect. It should rather be violent flutter and freezing of commands. At 400 km/h, all that is left is a marginal response of the ailerons, so that you could choose if you want to die "head first" or not:isadizzy: .

2- Probably due to AirWrench. But the Taifun is not a fighter. If I had to survive to a "Jug" making strafing passes at my Taifun, I would try to fly low and slow while turning away from his guns. I have done it in simulation against the 109 in the mission where you are an American general escaping - you know the one. My best score was 4 down before "getting it". Not so bad considering that I could only throw insults at them.
BTW, I succeeded in escaping only once...:sleep:

3- Swell, just what I needed: a slow a/c that crashes easy:kilroy: :icon31: !
(I hope that you realise by now that I'm joking:redf: ) More seriously, but barely, the crash detection of CFS1 is not its high point. I do not believe that all rough landings had to finish in a great ball of fire. BTW, have you tried to make it stand on its nose?

4- Flaps were called "landenklappen" in german for a reason. They were used as a sort of air brake. The competition in which Bf 108A participated needed that kind of brutal slowing and, I suppose, part of those qualities remained in the B version (although the flaps arrangement seems different to some extent).

Its getting late and, as you can see by my flat jokes, I'm tired.:blind:

Time to go, will be back fresher!

Hubbabubba

[Ivan]

Hi Hubbabubba,
Hope the machine restore is going well.

1. For an interesting vibration effect, take either one of my Wildcats up to about 25,000 feet and start a power dive. Is this the kind of effect you want? The vibration on the Wildcat was intentional as a soft limit on diving speed. It can be reproduced by reducing yaw damping. I believe this particular curve could still use some more tweaking for best effect.

2. Without this table for roll rate reduction, G-Loading does not affect roll rate. It is worth simulating for combat in my opinion and really doesn't cost anything. It is easy enough to copy this record from a stock AIR file.

3. The increase from about 50K to 70K actually makes the aircraft tougher but still crashable. Otherwise, if you raise the tail by harsh application of brakes and release the tail, plane will explode when the tail comes down.

4. Regarding Flap drag, I don't know that the number I picked is better or not. You be the judge. There is probably some indication of the power requirements when in landing configuration. I figure the number I put in feels about right.

- Ivan.

[womble55]

Glad you are up and running again....don't suppose it will teach you to save everything to CD regularly... hasn't with me!

[Ivan]

Hey Womble55,
I tried a backup on my own system last night. Unsuccessful. I am running a USB 2.0 CD ROM burner on an old Pentium 233. (Yeah, that is my development box.) It sometimes works....

Hubbabubba,
May I suggest that next time you are running at low level from a fighter that you turn TOWARDS the attack rather than away. It makes the firing opportunity more brief and also might cause the opposition to crash.

Hope that the Taifun is recovering successfully.

- Ivan.

[Ivan]

Hi Hubbabubba,
I am still checking out the AIR file for the Taifun. I still see that between about 200 and 230 knots, the elevator effectiveness is overly high. There seems to be a variable other than the two I know about which varies with airspeed and has a serious peak in this range.
- Ivan.

[P J Dunbar]

Bonjour Hubbabubba,

I hope you are recovering well from your crash and that you haven't lost irreplaceable things. Two years ago I had a hard drive crash too in which I lost the work of several months. When work is progressing, one doesn't think or find always the time for making backups. Although I could rebuild almost all the lost material, much of the time in an even improved way, it was still a big lost of time and as such very discourageing.

Courage, ça ira!

Pol

[hubbabubba]

Hi to you all!

It seems that I'm not the only one crashing these days!:costumes:

After hours - and days - of "reconstructive surgery" on the PC, I went to SOH for a little "R&R" to find it out of line.:banghead: I hope that someone could tell me what went wrong here.

I still have plenty of work before returning to AF99 "delicacy". While re-installing Office suite, Outlook messed with Outlook Express and destroyed address lists. I hate those "overbearing" program that want to control everything and end up f****ing everything.:toilet:

I'm in the process of going through shortcuts to see if I have to re-install or "merely" displace folders. To give you an idea, my CDRW is under the letter "T" now!

BTW, I have installed my Diamond Stealth S80 128DDR PCI video card and now have CFS1 in full-screen so dark that I have to fly in the "Windows screen" to play with it. I'm starting to think that it's a 100 bucks of hardware that will return in its box very soon.

Happy to see that SOH is back:applause: !!!

So long for now,

Hubbabubba

[hubbabubba]

Hubbabubba,
May I suggest that next time you are running at low level from a fighter that you turn TOWARDS the attack rather than away. It makes the firing opportunity more brief and also might cause the opposition to crash.


Ivan,

Maybe I was not crystal clear when I explained what I'm doing. I do turn towards them. I simply get out of their line of fire by turning within their turning radius and making them "nervous" chewing their tails. I made two 109 crash that way once.

But when there is eight of them, playing "Merry go round" is out of the question, there is always one or two of them that will play it smart and take some distance to get a good line of fire.

The only solution is to make some sharp turns at ground level, hoping that they will collide between them in your back. It works sometime.

By for now

Hubbabubba

[Ivan]

Sounds good enough to me. I am not one that is really qualified to give suggestions in aerial combat. I am not a particularly good virtual fighter pilot but I believe I am a pretty decent test pilot. :d Hope you get operational with AF99 soon.

- Ivan.