Testing the Spitfire VIII hf 601

[Daiwilletti]

I've just opened my MAW 1943 test-donkey for the first time since Christmas! Still trying to get ship formations to shoot back in campaign mode.

Flew as a British pilot today in a sjm_spitfire_m8_hf_601. This is a nice MAW-skinned pointy-winged Spit. My flight attacked sadly inert destroyers, when our top cover of identical Spitfires was set upon by a flight of 6 Me110 E 7s (DR_Bf110E_G5.xdp).

I expected the Spitfires to polish off the Me110Es (slightly elderly in July 1943) but no - its never that simple in the CFS3 world. By the time my flight of 8 had dropped our bombs on the inert targets below, the Me110s had shot down nearly all of my top cover. At the end of the furball, I was the only Spitfire remaining and was too badly damaged to warp back to base. Some of my AI wingmen had high skill levels, good health and gtolerance. Yet those Spitfire 8's felt slow to turn and underpowered compared with the 110s zipping around the place.

Note to self - either add weight to the Me110 .cfg, or add a null pylon of about 400kg to the loadouts somehow....

[ndicki]

400 kg is nowhere near enough. I usually add 750 to single-engined fighters, which is a rough approximation of what the added weight should be in the real world, and it still isn't really enough. I do suspect though that the Bf110 FM is a bit too generous...

[hairyspin]

I also remember BEAR saying the MAW 110 took a lickin’ but they kept on tickin’!

[gecko]

I've looked into the weight issue as well, and couldn't determine the cause of the AI vs player disparity. Messing with the fuel and ammo loads by adding so much that the landing gear collapsed, I found that the AI is affected the same way the player is by fuel weight and ammo weight. And yet with the player and AI flying identical aircraft, the AI will always outperform it.

[lgoncalv]

400 kg is nowhere near enough. I usually add 750 to single-engined fighters, which is a rough approximation of what the added weight should be in the real world, and it still isn't really enough. I do suspect though that the Bf110 FM is a bit too generous...

It is. I´ve been flying his plane for years - in the several versions - and i´m able to counter almost anything except Mustangs. Even P 47s are easy meat.
The same does n´t happen flying Firepower Me 410 with her wonderful spinning tendency. Perhaps her flight model could be useful to improve that of the 110, although i´m far from being an expert.

[Daiwilletti]

400 kg is nowhere near enough. I usually add 750 to single-engined fighters, which is a rough approximation of what the added weight should be in the real world, and it still isn't really enough. I do suspect though that the Bf110 FM is a bit too generous...

Thanks for the suggestion about weight, ndicki.

@gecko, the distinction between player aircraft and AI aircraft is a bit finer than that - I was careful to mention that my cover flight of AI spitfires did not perform very well against the spawned enemy AI aircraft. For some reason the friendly escort AI flight on the campaign mission does not seem to get the advantages of the random spawned enemy AI aircraft . I have found in the past that changing weight and MOI parameters in the cfg for an AI only version of an aircraft makes a marked difference.

@lgoncalv, I like your thinking - there may be something to learn from looking at the Me410 FM. After all, the 410 was supposed to address some of the problems with the Me110s performance, yet the FP Me410 is a spinning @#% to fly.

[Daiwilletti]

In the thread on FSX sound, Pat (clive) mentions that the CFS2 FMs can be ported over with a bit of polishing of headers. It would be interesting to compare the CFS2 FM with the CFS3 FM for my problematic Me110 E7 FM ..........

[gecko]

I got what you were saying, the AI/player difference is a related issue. And it may have a greater effect the larger the aircraft (e.g. Spitfire vs Bf 110). Changing weight or moi will certainly make a difference, inasmuch as it will pork the FM and take away their advantage. I'm just not convinced that weight is what is making the difference in the first place. I want to get to the bottom of whatever the actual difference is.

I'm not much of a mission builder, but I wonder if spawned AI fly differently or with more skill than AI that a set part of the mission.

The damage model could also be a factor. I used a much different approach to set up the damage and systems with the Spitfire than what AvHistory did with theirs.

[Daiwilletti]

I want to get to the bottom of whatever the actual difference is.

I'm not much of a mission builder, but I wonder if spawned AI fly differently or with more skill than AI that a set part of the mission.

The damage model could also be a factor. I used a much different approach to set up the damage and systems with the Spitfire than what AvHistory did with theirs.

Yes, understood. Be great if that coded long-standing issue could be "tweaked".

One factor for AI wingmen which are part of the campaign mission is that their skill level is set by the _mission.xml which is generated whenever a campaign mission is selected. The default seems to be skill=1. Whereas the skill level for random-spawned AI in the campaign mission is controlled by the spawn file. I have tried to overcome the default skill=1 problem by tweaking the pilotconstants and pilotattributes files, which successfully gives my AI wingmen a good set of features like higher vision, gtolerance etc. I have also added skill levels in the campaign params section of the uisel.xml, but I am unsure if that has an effect, because the _mission.xml file may override that.

What I once tried to set up is an Autohotkey to change the skill=1 parameter to skill=3, after the _mission.xml file is generated on selecting a campaign mission. That would be "the bomb" and a simpler version of the WM Scenerymanager and WOFF tools.

[hairyspin]

- there may be something to learn from looking at the Me410 FM. After all, the 410 was supposed to address some of the problems with the Me110s performance...

... but in fact turned out to have too many problems to be the answer. The 210 was worse!

[ndicki]

I've always felt that asking Rene nicely usually yields credible results. Rather than messing around with "I think it should fly like this," he actually works through piles and piles of obscure data until it replicates the known performance figures. Where he finds the information defeats me, but find it he does, and can back it up, too...

[hairyspin]

That, Nigel, is because Rene belongs to the brotherhood of FM masters; a clandestine company of arcane knowledge and mysterious oracles passed only to initiates and guarded from mere sim mortals. Yes, the Flight Masons.

[Daiwilletti]

Rotfl ....

[gecko]

Been doing some testing, it seems plausible to me that the AI uses a simplified propeller that operates at 100% efficiency all the time. For the player (and in real life) a propeller's efficiency is determined by a constantly changing combination of propeller blade angle, rpm, airspeed, and air density. It might make sense that the designers didn't want to devote processing resources for those equations for every prop in the game. I made a test of an air file with a prop that was 100% efficient at all times and got similar performance to the AI aircraft in my flight.

[greycap.raf]

After having read a lot of pilots' descriptions about the Bf 110, this may really be a case of too little weight and nothing more. In many sources the Bf 110C is quoted as having turning capabilities nearly as good as the Bf 109E (one such link here) so it wasn't quite that hopeless to begin with and the Bf 110E we have in MAW is underweight by half a ton, maybe more. Its empty weight is 10463 lbs whereas even the earlier C model is around 11500 lbs according to most sources and the F model, very similar to the E but equipped with different engines, is around the 12500 lbs mark. That combined with the fact that the Spitfire VIII with its high altitude wings isn't exactly the most manoeuvrable of Spitfires and the AI not carrying fuel weight at all - it's probably all that is needed.

I'd suggest increasing the empty weight by 2000 lbs, adding one of those dummy weight AI pylons to it to fix the fuel weight, and seeing how the situation develops. Perhaps even using the lighter Spitfire V or IX to see if it makes a difference.

[Daiwilletti]

Thanks gecko, greycap, for your words of wisdom.

Actually you are very nice not to point out that it was perhaps unwise of me to select a bird designed for high-altitude flight for my ground attack mission