New Release: Roland Laborie's Vought Crusader F8-E

I found another important fix. Default aircraft flight model has an excessive angle of attack (AoA) requirement which results in two unrealistic behaviours, at least with SU11:

  • Full elevator trim up still produces aircraft to fall at high descent rates even at max speeds, resulting in trim being not effective and still requiring additional manual elevation correction with stick at max trim setting to remain levered.

  • Landing results impossible due to that excessive nose up requirement even on full flaps and on full elevator trim up, and still results in an excessive descent rate with no visibility at all as well due to the nose elevation.

This is caused by the lift/drag curves, but there´s one parameter inside flight_model.cfg that can solve this quite easily:

[AIRPLANE_GEOMETRY]
wing_incidence = 0.1

Current value configured in original model is 0, meaning that wing produces no lift when its angle of attack is near zero. Default value in game for F18 is 0.5 degrees, and 1.5 degrees is the one proposed by the SDK docs, but I think this is too much as it does not generate any stall in this aircraft even below it´s configured stall speed. But something just slightly above 0 is enough to modify in one go the shape of lift + drag curves and gain some lift when wings AoA is near 0. So basically this tunes the curves without changing the max and min values defined in the original model.

You could also use lower values like the following for a smaller correction on the original curves but this still results in excessive AoA requirements in my opinion, so values near the first one are a bit better:

[AIRPLANE_GEOMETRY]
wing_incidence = 0.05

This change alone results in a more optimized and levered glide (around -500 ftm) at 170kts, with full flaps and moderate elevator trim up setting but still pitches nose down at lower flaps settings or speeds. This improves the landing visibility as well as nose is not so pitched up and landing gear is still levered as well for the touchdown, which is specially relevant for carrier operations with this aircraft, as seen in the following pictures.

Maybe someone finds a better setting but for the time being I hope this helps to easily fix the AoA and descent rate issues.

Cheers

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