There are several interesting aircraft with more than four engines. The XB-70 and An-225 had / have six, the B-52 has eight. The Do X had twelve, but for that it would probably be enough to have the sim treat it as six and treat each pair of pulling and pushing engine as one;)
Sure, for example for the B-52 you could just model the eight engines visually and have the sim treat them as four, but that then means that the smoke / contrails from the engines will be wrong, doesn’t it?
(Note that I am not asking for included aircraft with more than four engines. Third parties can create such if it would just be possible.)
Hi there, is this a request for a default aircraft with more than four engines in the sim, or is this a request for support in the sim for more than four engines (via throttle quadrant support and contrails)?
A request for support for more than four engines in the sim. It is currently limited to four in the cfg file by the aircraft editor (and presumably the simulator internals). Will edit the post…
This needs more views. Its disappointing for a modern sim to only support 4 engines. Perhaps only a few aircraft have more than 4 engines but it only adds more to the realism and possibilities if there was support for these minority aircraft.
It certainly is something to consider for the future. However I do not see that as something urgent since all in all there haven’t been THAT many aircraft with more than 4 engines over the past 100+ years. Sure there’s the B-52, the Do-X or the Spruce Goose to name a few, but overall that’s just a drop in the bucket. Using more than four engines was always a compromise for large aircraft when there weren’t any engines available that were powerful enough. Had i.e. the B-52 been developed 15 years later it most likely would also have had only four engines. There even was a project for retrofitting the whole fleet to four more modern engines but it was deemed too expensive
Also there’s currently not really any hardware to support more than four engines (unless you have three Saitek throttles)
IMHO there are more basic and urgent things that need fixing than adding support for that.
I m running the Logitech yoke and throttle together with the thrust master airbus joystick and yoke (my yoke was bought during the fs2004 A Century Of Flight days so Im going to probably look at the Logitech Boeing yoke and throttle for even more axes)
I didn’t claim it would be “urgent”. But if the codebase is sane it would be just a question of changing one simple definition somewhere from #define MAXENGINES 4 to #define MAXENGINES 12 and that would have no impact at all on performance or resource consumption or anything.
But yeah, the codebase probably isn’t that sane and clean. It probably is full of legacy weirdness, and with MSFS2020 then bringing in new and cool technologies like JavaScript and whatnot that hardly has made the internals cleaner.
No, but I could manipulate the 6 or 8 modeled throttles in the cockpit. My physical controller would move them in unison, and if I want different throttle setting for some reason for different engines, I would then adjust that in the cockpit. People fly four-engined simulated aircraft with a single physical throttle all the time, why would flying a six-engined aircraft be any different.
The point is not so much being able to control their thrust individually, but things like failure simulation. If you want to simulate one engine out of six failing, and you have to pretend there is just four engines in your add-on, with each simulator engine representing one and a half actual engines, how do you handle it? Make one engine produce one third the thrust even if it is at maximum throttle?
Indeed. So do I to be fair. Those seeking deeper immersion might invest in actual hardware but 99% of use it’s not required.
That said. I do actually use a physical throttle for each of the engines on twin engine aircraft but only about 5% of that is “immersion” about 25% is the convenience of using differential thrust to reduce my turning circle on the ground and the other 70% is “just because those extra handles are there.”
At present I don’t own any aircraft in MSFS2020 where the power output from each engine varies significantly enough to need individual adjustment.
I’m also sure that with a little vJoy/Joystick Gremlin magic you could probably make one physical throttle do some quite interesting multi throttle stuff.
