X-24...Piglets things without wings...

[lazarus]

Having a look to see what it needs for FSX. Cockpit is T-2 cab gauges. Looks good, displays fine. 'Scuse the 20 minute re-paint. Sort of a Dynasoar surrogate. Flys nice, bumped roll stab to 2.85, fuel flow scalar to 10, thrust to 52200 lbs. 180,000 ft, 80 MN down range in 90 seconds from brakes off to zero fuel, then glide back.523605236152362

[kilo delta]

Some excellent work there Laz. I'm a huge fan of the X planes. The lifting bodies always remind me of the intro to The Six Million Dollar Man series.:ernae:

[Lateral-G]

Always loved this one. It would be great if there was a way you could be dropped from a B-52 in FSX.

Any chance your updates will be available anywhere?

[Mach3DS]

I tried to get this one working in FSX, but the with no luck. Any chance of uploading an FSX friendly version? :) I've always wished that Piglet would revisit this one in the form of the X-24B, or the never built (officially) X-24C.

[lazarus]

Yup. I'll upload it to the usual suspects when done. I was noodling the air drop idea. I got to wondering about the glider tow option. Set up the ALPHA C-141 or a default tube as a tow ship like the DARK HORSE C-141/F-106 trial back in the '90s. Then I got to thinking. Could the glider tow be set up to tuck the Tub up under the wing of say the 747, or the KBT B-52 Balls8. Any ideas? And flight dynamics. It flys quite nicely out of the box, with the roll rate damped down, and it needs some pitch stability augmentation at altitude, but I could use some help with getting enough oomph to fly a sub-orbital profile, or even LEO insertion, say be able to get to 400,000ft. Any takers?
edit. FSX X-24 mod BETA V.1. Panel modded to use Piglets T-2 CAB file, included. Flight dynamics modified to use elements (thrust, engine data, FDE.) from Bruce fitzgeralds 2010 Rockwell shuttle. Fuel burn still to be set. A FS2002 VOR error message still comes up.
No radios or autopilot yet. Re-paint cleaned up, but I've only put an hour into it at this point. All textures in DXT3 no mips. Effects included, from default and 5239552396Bruces Shuttle, on gauge control and smoke system. Only one test flight
in this configuration. Nice and controlable, altitude topped out at 610,801 ft in zoom climb from 180,000ft. Glides back nice, good stability and control.
The catch here is I would like some feed back on this for a change, so when it goes to general release, it works as its supposed to

[Lateral-G]

Just took her up for a flight from Edwards.

Took off at dawn from Rwy 4 and maintained heading. This thing goes like a bat out of hell now...:eek:

I was expecting to run out of fuel but the fuel qty never moved. I climbed on engine thrust alone to FL 373 before it pooped out. She stalled out around 95 KIAS and wallowed. I turned off the thrust and left it off to dead stick. Once I gained some speed I tried turning her but rudders were minimally effective. I had to add a lot of aileron and rudder to get her to swing back around. Even then I lost it a few times. I had to wait until I got into thicker air before I had comfortable control.

On the way down thru FL 100 she really picked up speed. It hovered right around 960 KIAS. The rudders locked out above 800 KIAS so all I had was roll and pitch for control. It wasn't roll or pitch sensitive at all.

I maintained at least a 6000 FPM rate of descent to wards KEDW. Indicated airspeed dropped thru the descent. Once I was below FL 38 it was near 248 KIAS and dropped slowly after that to about 220 KIAS through gear extension. As I descended my rate of descent slowed further and I held it around 3000 FPM which was a good setting. I made it all the way to RWY 22. Gear was lowered around 3900 MSL and airspeed dropped to 150 KIAS and I touched down about 142 KIAS.

All in all a good flight.

The thing that surprised me the most was how fast the acceleration was now and the rate of climb. It took less than 2 or 3 minutes to get to max altitude.

hope this helps you out...

[lazarus]

It does help enormously. Thanks Gee. I'm geting identical results, so its working about right. I find it helpful to take off and land with one engine (2 out of 4 chambers) shut down, and go easy on the throttle untill its time to go up. Its not realistic for the X-24, as it had about 8800 lbs of thrust, 100 seconds burn time at max honk, and at best hit mach 1.6-1.8 @ 80,000ft. This FDE set is more a spaceplane. I'll write up a more realistic one for a stock X-24A. I found the flight controls very stiff at lower IAS, but pretty good at high IAS; so I turned down the stability gain on all three axis, haven't flown it in this config yet. I did some more fiddling on the panel, and some mods on the ship2 'C' model.
BETA version 1.25242252423

[delta_lima]

Now THIS got my attention ... thanks Laz - how your interests and mine converge without ever talking about it is truly bizarre.

I have long dreamed about an HL-10 or X-24B model - this was my favourite Piglet addon in FS9, and will now get some more airtime in X.

thanks to Laz and Piglet, of course - this is a gem!

dl

[DennyA]

This is one of my favorite Piglet planes of all time. I'd asked about the possibility of an FSX SDK update (man, I'd love to glide this into the FSX Edwards!), but I tim said he didn't have the source files in an updatable format.

(I run DX10, so FS9 ports aren't an option, alas...)

[lazarus]

(I run DX10, so FS9 ports aren't an option, alas...)[/QUOTE] Yarf. Thats the one reason I haven't fired up the DX10. Too many worth while ports.
The latest revision flies quite nicely, control response is better without hairy high speed stability problems. I'll start into the final panel. Needs a ASI that reads higher mach than 1.5. The paint shop is starting up on it. First out, 82-806 'Tubnick' , as she became known after being painted up in Soviet marks for the 1982 film 'Stealing Thunder', about a defecting Soviet Cosmonaut...525145251552516

[Lateral-G]

I tried the V2 of the X-24......mixed feelings on this one.....

Same profile attempted as before. However once reaching the max altitude she deep stalled and took forever to recover. I think I finally exited the stall around FL 94. 280K ft to recover :o

Once stable the speed stayed fairly high; somewhere around 900 KIAS. Initially I was concerned about making the runway at KEDW but the higher speed meant more distance covered. I tried to keep a 2000 FPM rate of descent. Rudder was ineffective at controlling crossrange deviations, I had to use a lot of aileron and was in a 90 deg bank and lots of back elevator to make the turn.

At five miles out from touchdown I was still doing almost 760 KIAS and I needed to use the airbrake to slow down, in fact I needed it all the way to touch down. During final, when trying to make course corrections to line up I found it handled more like an airliner...very slow and ungainly on the inputs.

The fuel qty still stayed at 99% through out the flight. I ended up shutting the engine down. You may need to correct the fuel burn rate so it at least runs out at the appropriate time.

I think I like your first iteration better at this point.....

hope this helps.

[lazarus]

Its a juggling act. I expect the Tubs were not the most responsive flying machines built. They were highly sensitive to AOA and flow separation, and were flown very tightly by the numbers. We are also trying to do this with out a SAS system, which is something I'll have to look into. Might end up with an auto pilot for high speed, high altitude work.
I still have not touched the fuel burn thing yet. I'll leave that for later after the flight qualities are putty'd over. I got the stall warning horn on untill it was down in thicker air, but as the atitude was OK-20 deg nose up untill I was getting some bite on the controls, I didn't worrry too much. Keeping at it. Thanks for the test-piloting. I'll try some different things and post revisions here. Go ahead and monkey with it too. Y'all may have more luck with it , or get lucky and hit the right combination. For me , its really hit and miss, try it and see, as I really only have a vauge idea what I'm doing, and an making it up as I go. Still pretty new at all of this...

[warchild]

The tubs were infamous for their side to side falling leaf performance.. The opening to the six million dollar man shows this effect quite well..

[Ian Warren]

:icon_lol:Steve Austin, we can rebuild him :wavey: Ohi ..over here how bout me .. only kidding .. i thought he was a HL-10 driver :running:

[lazarus]

BETA V1.3.Improved control response through out envelope, 'Tubnik' soviet style skin, VOR warning message removed( I think) fuel burn set up to be rocket like at full honk. Operational notes. Take off and climb out at low throttle, 1/8th or so, climb out at 250-350kts to keep fuel consumption down, or shut down one engine while climbing to altitude. At 75,000 ft, light off all the engines, throttle up to full throttle, climb out at 30-50 deg. You get about 60-100 seconds or so at 90-100%. Carefull attitude and throttle can get you to 400,000+ ( best altitude I've got so far was 720,000ft) I try to leave 10% fuel to 'power' the 'APU' (and keep the attitude indicator going.) It builds speed up fast descending, use speed brakes. It will fly a pretty decent skip-glide profile at 250-320,000ft, unpowered, trading airspeed for altitude. Flew sub-orbital from Wake to Kwajalien unpowered after burn out.(30 minutes there, 15 minutes descending and screwing around landing. Neat!) Had enough energy to make Japan or Hawaii, easy. The rudders also lock out over 750-800KTS, so its roll and pull(gently!) to change direction- fairly typical high speed handling. High altitude cruise is best handled with pitch trim. The stall horn bleats away intermitantly at altitude, but as long as its not tumbling, don't sweat the petty things. Remember, smooth, slow and gentle, 85kts IAS at 399,000ft is like 800Kts ground speed, and you've got a couple of hundred thousend feet altitude to play with.See how it goes.

They show 'Steve Austin, Astronaut. A man barely alive' dropping off the B-52 in a HL-10, the crash footage is Bruce Peterson getting into a PIO in the M2-F2

[sarwulf]

Hello Lazarus, after downloading the file from your link for ver1.3, and when unzipping the file, it keeps reporting an internal failure in the zip and will not unzip. Any ideas?
Thanks!

[lazarus]

Huh. Re-uploaded. Weird. somethings frying the zip file...OK. I downloaded it, unzips fine.

[sarwulf]

Lazarus, re-downloaded and when I went to unzip, did the same thing. Keeps saying there's an internal runtime error in the zip file and fails to unzip. Not sure what's up?

[Mach3DS]

Not sure. I DL it and seems to work fine for me. Although I do get a bunch of failed gauges notices. But nothing major.

[lazarus]

Dunno kids. I zip it up, ul it. DL it, its fine. Try it latter, its kaput. Plffft! Sendspace is having tantrums too. I give. I guess it'll keep till the final is done, when ever that is.

[Lateral-G]

I was able to d/l and extract the original v3 with no problems.....have yet to fly though.....

[Lateral-G]

OK, just got to fly v3......here's my flight report:

T/O from rwy 4 KEDW @ 1/4 throttle and maintained 280KIAS during climb, fuel at 98% at top

At FL 60 went full throttle (starting at 98% fuel)

Maintained approx 30 deg nose up during climb

Fuel 0% @ FL 210

Continued climbing; @ FL 316 180 KIAS

Max altitude reached FL 322 @ 150 KIAS

Handling was a bit difficult, especially trying to make the 180 back to KEDW, departed controlled flight a few times, managed to get her back under control at FL 232 @ 240 KIAS

FL 189, 260 KIAS, position apporx 25NM north of KNLV, very yaw sensitive

Heading approx 240, FL 160, 310 KIAS, about 25 deg nose down attitude

FL 85 507 KIAS 60NM from touch down

FL 70 671 KIAS air brake deployed

FL 42 542 KIAS 25NM to touch down, rudder sensitivity reduced

FL 25 358 KIAS 15NM to touch down

FL 15 260 KIAS 10NM to touch down

FL 10 237 KIAS 6NM to touch down, air brake closed/stowed

6500 MSL 347 KIAS 5NM to touch down

5000 MSL 279 KIAS, gear deployed

touch down @ 156 KIAS

This flight didn't get as high but that was probably due to throttle use fuel burn. Still pretty good. It would be nice if the 180 turn back could be done without departing the envelope as much but it is what it is.

hth

-G-