I realized after these last few comments that I hadn’t ever taken the Spit up past around 7,500’. So this afternoon I took off out of Honolulu, climbed to about 21,000’ and enjoyed the view. No trouble at all. Just be sure to have the fuel valve (red handle at lower right of the main dashboard) set to ON, the fuel booster pump also set to ON (sort of hidden away under the trim wheel on the left wall of the cockpit, in a row with the manual coolant flap switch and pitot heat switch), and open the oxygen valve on the right wall of the cockpit to make sure not to pass out.
Yep there’s definitely a problem here. I just took the update out for a spin and I’m experiencing the exact same issue with the engine. Fuel pump on/off makes no difference - but turning on the fuel pressure cock does work.
That shouldn’t need to be turned on until 12000 feet though. Something is broken unfortunately.
@LameLefty are you sure you have the 1.1.0 update? Your pic shows the cannons and they’ve gone for me since the update. Or maybe you have a different 1.1.0 which was not installed from marketplace?
For sure flying the spit up to 40kft is slow but the view from there is great and throwing it into a dive for 35kft to hit the 450mph top speed is short but heaps of fun! Before the update I needed to open the fuel pressure switch (rotating red handle) at about 12kft now I need it at ground level which is clearly broken. The failure mode of the engine is the same without it which is what gave me the idea to try that workaround in the first place.
Good news, I found another workaround for the fuel starvation/engine surging issue.
First I tried deleting and reinstalling the extension but that didn’t help.
Eventually I found that if you open the simulated iPad tablet, go to settings page and under realism turn OFF engine damage, then it works normally. Turn it back on and immediately it goes wrong again.
I don’t know what the default was but I always turn on max realism for everything so I may have changed it.
I can live with damage disabled for now but it would be nice to get that fixed, for the extra peril and entertainment.
I’m on PC and bought the plane directly from the developer’s site, not the Marketplace. I would suggest contacting the devs directly on their Discord - they do tend to be pretty responsive to support requests on the appropriate channels.
Alternately, you could try asking GotGravel on his Discord too:
Well, I just took another high-altitude flight in the Spit (this time up over 30,000’) and had no trouble except for overheating the engine a bit during the climb - you absolutely need to reduce boost and engine RPM via the propeller lever in order to prevent overheating the oil, otherwise you’ll smoke the oil and risk an engine failure - too long past 95C and you’ll start seeing smoke out the back.
As for surging, again - are you sure you’re configuring the engine fuel boost pump correctly? The switch defaults to Off if you spawn on the runway, and when starting cold and dark, it’s really hard to see from the default camera position. You also absolutely have to have the red fuel pressure valve set to ON once you get to around 12,000’.
As you can see, I have the tablet (which was only enabled with version 1.1.0) and Engine Damage is enabled:
For sure I have the fuel pump switch, the tiny hidden one, on although as BobaDennis already posted it makes no difference to the behaviour when the problem is present. And the altitude doesn’t affect it here because this happens on the ground even before takeoff.
100% agreed. I’ve been flying the Spit solid for over a month with no issues. It’s not user error with the fuel pump on/off switch, and can confirm the fuel cock being ON does solve the problem (even though it shouldn’t be switched on until ~12000’).
I could be wrong, but is this the same engine problem that is currently happening with the left engine on the P38L? Ironically I don’t have that issue with my P38, but then again I have the direct download version of the P38 while I have the marketplace version of the Spit.
Hi, just updated from the marketplace and i can’t get the tablet to work, I can get the tablet to appear but i can’t press any of the buttons.
Does anyone have any ideas please?
