yes, wheel chocks were set and pitot covers on. all doors open. however the ground power would not stay activated.
for fuel leak, I didn’t realize that was a thing. i’ll check the failures
I wonder if this is one of those planes where the GPU is sensitive to parking position. Did you try and hook it up pre or post flight? I know with some aircraft the GPU won’t work if the aircraft isn’t in a parking spot recognized by the sim. If you were having difficulties post flight, that could be your problem. The BKSQ King Air did this IIRC.
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interesting. it was pre-flight, as soon as the plane loaded. but it was a custom airport, so maybe you’re on to something
An excerpt from the BLSQ Analog Baron manual:
Mixture & Fuel Flow
“Unfortunately, the MSFS internal combustion simulation is lacking as it concerns mixture and fuel flow. Under all but extremely high density altitude conditions, reducing the mixture setting should always result in decreased fuel flow at the same throttle setting. In MSFS, fuel flow will fall off as horsepower decreases with an overly rich mixture setting. This is not detrimental to the operation of this aircraft, but is nevertheless unrealistic. A potential solution is being researched for future Black Square aircraft, and updates for the Analog Baron.”
Is this fixed with the Piston Duke already?
I actually don’t know if it is despite the manual stating the engine model is all custom.
I’ve noticed lately that the fuel flow initially starts to rise when you start pulling back the mixture. Throttle was constant and mp was unmoving, I usually cruise at 16 to 20k ft. Unsure if I was experiencing those high density conditions mentioned.
I think on one flight I actually ended with a slightly higher fuel flow leaned to 50 rop which really doesn’t seem right.
I’ll need to do more testing.
Thanks for the testing.
Meanwhile I looked into the manual of Piston Duke and found the same statement that was in the Analog Baron. I take it official that the unrealistic behavior is not fixed yet.
Do you, or does anyone know other piston aircraft addons that dealt with it? I heard FSW C414 and A2A Comanche don’t have this problem. I’m curious how Blackbird (Milviz) C310R behaves.
The FSW. C414 models it “better”… the A2A Comanche, models all the, mixture/fuel-flow/altitude/MP/RMP relationships, to an uncanny, realistic level.
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After some more testing it seems to only do weird things at higher MPs (around 30+, at 25MP I was getting the expected reduction with no increase. So maybe something to do with the turbocharger operation?
I think that’s an old FSX or even earlier legacy inaccuracy. Always felt like the fuel flow was correlated with power, not the mixture lever. So fuel flow always dropped as the engine lost power during a climb. As power was recovered by leaning, fuel flow would go back up. There is some FDE sorcery and custom mixture lever coding that needs to happen to mitigate that.
A2A nails it because they do it all outside of the sim and bypass all of that nonsense.
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It shouldn’t be that hard to make at least act mostly right.
I mean having it be a parameter based on power is just a complete misunderstanding about how engines work.
The mixture control should hardly be a complicated thing to get right, I mean it’s an incredibly simple device on an actual plane, just a lever connected to a cable that controls a needle that controls the fuel flow into the carb at any throttle setting.
The math there is not that complicated to get the fuel flow and general effects on power correct especially in the context of a sim like this where even the planes we consider unimpressive are still a complex piece of software.
Not saying the level to which A2A models the effects of the mixture is simple, but the basics really are, especially in regards to fuel flow.
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This is something that must be fixed, in MSFS 2024..
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Yes. And I mean it’s just low hanging fruit to get at least rightish instead of completely wrong. I’m a software engineer by trade, and the common improvements that everyone, myself included, would like to see like better standard flight model, better weather, better AI ATC/traffic, better performance optimization etc. That stuff’s incredibly difficult and complex. I mean I would have no idea where to start.
This? At least to a basic extent that at least follows the pattern of how it really behaves I could work it out myself with some data charts. Like the mixture is basically a faucet for the fuel. More mixture, more fuel, less mixture less fuel. Carbs pull fuel in by suction, so less manifold pressure(not throttle position as far as the carb is concerned 20mp is 20mp), less fuel sucked in, although I guess the suction is less impacted than the mixture, hence not being able to just set it and forget it plus usually you want it richer or leaner than “perfect”. The injected engines actually work roughly the same way even though they have a computer controlling the fuel delivery, besides the few with FADEC they don’t have O2 sensors on the back end to tell if it’s running too lean or rich so they digitally do basically the same thing that carbs just naturally do to compensate for the air density. Some rough performance numbers for how too lean/too rich effects power and that’s about it to make it at least act rightish.
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You’re all over it… just add RPM to the mix (MP X Volume), to get fuel flow.. then normalize for power …. It could/should work well enough for turbo charging too. It’s kinda silly that it is still “broken”..
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The device might be ‘simple’ but the breadth of physics is hardly… I give them more sympathy here for not getting it perfect, vs… say the clicking noise everytime you adjust the WHEEL trim in a Skyhawk. Or how nearly all GA parking spots spawn you with your nose facing a fence or building - those, were, and are now, wildy simple screw-ups they failed on quite hard.
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What’s happening is it’s overreacting to high density altitudes, which it’s been doing for several previous versions of legacy versions of the sim. In these cases, it’s acting as if a fully rich mixture is choking the engine.
Now, this can happen in real life but to a much smaller extent than it does in the sim. For example, if you’re up at 10,000’, fully rich in a 172, you might see a few tenths GPH increase and a bit of RPM increase when initially leaning, but it’ll quickly start to fall off.
This plays into leaning on the ground at power, prior to takeoff at high density altitudes, where you’ll again see a rise in RPM (on a fixed pitch prop) and slightly more power being developed. This is a common mountain flying technique (always follow recommendations in the POH and any mountain instruction you get).
The problem with the sim is it overplays this effect, where you might be fully rich, climbing through, say only 5,000 or 7,000’ and you’re experiencing a severe drop-off in power and fuel flow, which then recovers quite a bit (I’ve seen several GPH and several hundred RPM) as you begin to lean, then starts to drop again as you continue to lean toward peak. It shouldn’t be doing that at those lower altitudes as an overly rich mixture just won’t have that much of an effect, again, until you get much higher.
It does need to be fixed.
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I’ve been slowly fixing that in the world hub. The problem is the sim doesn’t have a built-in mechanism to allow for shutting down in front of a spot in a row of planes and pushing the plane back in to the spot tail-first. Additionally, if you look at how parking spots are rendered as sim objects, they’re all circular. This means if you have them alternating like they do in real life, the circles all overlap (rather than accounting for the smaller horizontal stabs that are adjacent to each other, but alternating nose direction) and I don’t think the AI likes that. Even dumber is that when you connect the parking spot to a taxiway path node, it defaults to pointing directly away from the node, so you have to manually rotate them 180° to face nose-out.
But the world hub mods accept the fixes, so that’s good. Hopefully we don’t have to start over from scratch again when 2024 hits because it’s a lot of tedious work.
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The physics isn’t simple, but the input and result can be to be much better than what we have.
I’m not saying everyone needs to do whatever witchcraft A2A managed to make it really act like a real carb, just making the fuel flow generally match the density, mixture, throttle and prop selections would not be that hard relatively speaking. I mean look at the sim they made, everyone has their complaints but come on it’s astonishing. Can’t generally match some basic fuel delivery parameters?
For the record I roll my eyes at a lot of the demands because I know how complicated it is. A lot of the demands people make just sound greedy and whiney to me honestly. I mean emulating weather conditions and then flight characteristics in that weather? It’s freaking amazing how good it is even though it’s not perfect.
This is dirt simple compared with that, you don’t have to model the carb to get it way closer to how it really acts, just look at the set of inputs(air density, temperature, throttle, prop and mixture settings) and then outputs(power and fuel flow) and go from there. They clearly have very smart people working there, it’s a very solvable issue in the context.
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Got it. Honestly, I’m a slow climber, I get to a safe altitude and then slow things down and lean it out so I only rarely see it.
…plus the Comache’s what I’ve flown like 80% of the time since I’ve known enough about flying to care anyway and the 414 is pretty much the only non turbine I fly often otherwise. I think I thought the issue being talked about was bigger.
Honestly just looked at this thread because I’m on xbox(I know, balling on a budget but buying expensive add ons. One day I’ll build a PC) and thought today might be the day the Dukes came to marketplace because they are supposedly submitted but no they released a bunch of liveries and activities.
Why that concern about the fuel? To me this detail don’t add or subtract nothing to the simulation. IRL there are a lot of variables that influence the fuel consumption, I tink that may be extremely difficult to simulate all properly. Besides, the fuel on MSFS is free.
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Getting right value for fuel flow shouldn’t be that hard as you pointed out, but my uneducated guess tells me that it is the real problem too many things in MSFS are referencing the false value and they can’t easily be redirected to right values. Typical MSFS thing, maybe?
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