Landings sure are interesting when the gear takes forever to extend. At least you don’t have to manually wind that wheel! I came in on a very long downwind to let the gear down, was still winding it down when I was on final and it finally was fully extended a few hundred feet from the threshold. Final approach is quite tricky as visibility is quite bad. I basically ended up stalling the plane onto the runway and then veered about a bit but we got her down. The mechanics might not be best pleased though.
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Brilliant job! Took me a while to work out what that spinning wheel was. You really need to plan ahead for your gear transitions.
Brilliant plane. Thank you so much for all your hard work. Excited to see how it’s going to progress – it’s already a lot of fun!
With regard to takeoff/landing visibility, pressing the up-cursor-arrow twice will push your head up against the top of the canopy – I just think of it as raising my seat or sitting up as straight as possible! Then once the air, I tap down-arrow once.
Just loving flying the Comet. What a brilliant aircraft and an incredible freeware addtion, and a big thanks to @Shepbur for all your effort.
Every racing plane needs a Red Bull livery, so I just had to do one.
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Looks great! Glad it came out well despite the really inefficient weirdly mapped fuselage 
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As for all the other comments, thankyou for the kind words and I’m glad that you’re all enjoying her challenges! There is a preset raised camera which might help a bit with taxiing, although it’s a pretty unrealistic position, technically you should be zigzagging to taxi, then shutting down and getting wheeled around, but personally I just point it in one direction and gun it assuming I’m not going to hit anything!
The gear extention time is also something I’m not super used to… The fact that you’re so slow for such a long time is a bit unnerving personally… Although I do like the last half circuit as you come round to land on the threshold, just need to get used to starting that gentle decent really early, and not worry about having to run a couple of circuits before finally landing. Not sure LAX or Heathrow would appreciate it!
After a (sadly unsurprising) number of comments taking issue with the long time it takes to retract the gear (as if we were all super humans who bench press a cathedral of nuns every day for 12 hours - these comments haven’t been made on these forums by the way - only very positive responses!), as well as the difficulty in checking and maintaining fuel levels on the ground resulting in poor ground handling, i have bitten the bullet… to some extent…I have just produced and uploaded a ‘simplification’ modification on flightsim.to to take out some of the more challenging aspects of flying a vintage endurance racing aircraft and make it easier for those casual fliers looking for a quick thrill in the skies! While i do so regrettably, hopefully this will appease those who were wanting something more like the comics, stories and artwork of the period suggest!
Luckily for the majority of you - i refuse to turn this into an arcade project to satisfy those who want to jump in, fly round big ben twice and land within 15 minutes! I will stick to my guns on my main upload of the aircraft itself and continue to improve it’s realism (probably to a limited extent for the freeware in the end however - sorry, but i really want this to succeed… and sadly it won’t end up cheap for me, but i will endeavor to make it cheap for all you!).
Keep on crashin’,
~Shepbur
Edit: As an aside, i’ve been loving the videos i’ve spotted of her on youtube thus far!
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Thanks for keeping this separated. I have no desire to be lumped in with the TikTok generation who want instant everything. Very much appreciated! And before someone calls me out of touch, I do use TikTok against my better judgement
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v0.6.3 of the comet is due for release within 36hrs of SU10 being released in the sim… Everything is working fine and as intended in the beta at least!
Some of the new graphical additions are a little rudimentary due to a new child being added to my life at the weekend, but everything functions great on the new version!
Update changelog:
New modern fuel system closer to the original found in 1934
Fix to the issue where you were spawning with a full front tank resulting in unbalanced cg by default… Now you have half a tank and 3 hours flight time within CG limits by default
New fuel system controls for the additional valves in the cockpit
A swap from engine temp to oil press gauges, alongside some minor corrections to get the pressures about right for now…
Updated fuel usage which better fits ranges for cruise altitude flying (the range is currently about 500nm too high at sea level however!)
This also means a change for the simplification mod… I have removed the old fuel system and updated it to the new one, only shifted the tank positions and empty cg, so all fuel levels have no effect on CG position (it sits pretty much midway between both limits). It also has all valves open by default so it essentially acts as 1 big tank.
I will be updating the manual for the release too to describe and support the new fuel system, and will copy some of the information over here too.
Edit:thank you to the 1500 people who have downloaded her so far!
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Congratulations on shipping the new family member! 
Excited for the new version. This is really fun to fly.
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v0.6.3 of the comet, as well as v1.1 of the simplification mod are now released on flightsim.to and should be fully compatible with SU10!
Enjoy flying her with her new fuel systems! (and have a read of the new manual included for some more detail/changes)
~Shep
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Apologies for a long gap between any updates or information, with the arrival of a new member of the family, I literally haven’t had a moment to work on the comet at all for the last 4 weeks…
While development might be on hold for the time being, it is far from dead! I will pick up and continue the modelling whenever family life calms down a bit and will keep you all up to date when I do get the ball rolling again! I am still keeping an eye on the forums and the download page/ discord for any new comments/ issues and will do my best to update her if any issues do appear in any updates between now and then!
P.s. currently the same time period that the macrobertson air race occured! So take her up for a flight down memory lane!
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Congratulations on the arrival of a new member to your Family 
Many congrats! I remember when my eldest arrived, and my time for FS was a bit reduced. She’s now 12 and I haven’t done any modelling in 6 years or so, so once the first few months have settled down, make hay as the time will get less 
Having said that, I wouldn’t change any of it 
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Well it’s been a very long and unproductive time since release unfortunately! I haven’t had a single chance to crack on with any modelling or system updates… That being said, I did finally find the cause of all those dodgy default camera positions…I had my pilot height set to 80 and not 50! So for all of you with default settings you were probably more like 4’9" instead of 5’9"!
I have made a fix on my end but don’t feel it’s really worth an update of its own given my lack of extra work on the project this far…
Hopefully with my son sleeping a little longer I will be able to get back to working on it at night/ early hours of the morning in the coming months…and I will keep you updated either way!
Happy holidays to you all!
Shep
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Heh I always thought the default view was too low and had to raise the view every time I flew it. Is there a simple file edit one can do to correct the viewpoint?
Happy holidays to you as well
After a long absence I’ve recently gotten back into Microsoft Flight Simulator, in fact purchased the current edition outright specifically when I heard about the 40th anniversary edition. I remember the Century of Flight edition, and enjoying the many vintage-era aircraft it included. While many of these ACOF aircraft are again included in the 40th anniversary update, I was disappointed that the DH88 Comet wasn’t one of them. So kudos for all the work and hours you’ve put into recreating it!
While I was very comfortable installing add-ons in previous version of FS (and even created an add-on of my own at some point) I’m hesitant to start playing around with add-ons on my nice fresh Store/PC-only install. But if and when I do, this is going to be one of the first additions to my hangar!
Thank you!
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It’s incredibly simple to add add ons. Just drop them in the “Community” folder. And if want to uninstall simply delete the folder again.
It’s quite addictive to find and download new add ons though.
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Sounds simple enough. I’ve downloaded the file. A couple of questions (and forgive me if these have been explained elsewhere and are obvious to most other forum members):
I have found the Community folder for my install.
- Can I drop the ZIP file directly in the Community folder or do I need to unzip it first?
- If I do have to unzip it first, do I move the entire decompressed ‘tap-dh88-comet’ folder into the Community folder as is? I notice this folder contains three subfolders: ContentInfo, Effects, and SimObjects. Based on previous versions (eg FS9, FSX) I would have expected that these three individual folders get dropped into the Community folder, but the ‘layout.json’ and ‘manifest.json’ files that are also included in the root of the ZIP file seem to contradict that approach.
I’m hoping somebody can steer this FS2020 newbie in the right direction.
not sure how to word this but the folder that contains the manifest and json files and the other folders goes into the community.
so the folder you put in the community if you open it you will see the manifest etc
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