Good point on the A2A titles. I'd love to see more of those, hopefully in the normal GA spheres. As for the Katana, it's a benchmark when it comes to those features and the corresponding consequences. Gives you, in my eyes, a totally different way of interacting with the sim.

 

Not that throttle and forget style, but that 'I hope I did everything right' one, together with some sort of luck on e.g. the items which can fail, even if you treat them right. And for the folks not looking for those things or just not today, you can turn it off. Perfect solution.

 

By the way, dmaher, great post and video there.

 

I bought the Do-27 and the Katana during the sale, and I had time to check only the first (and less advanced) aircraft. They are both from Marcel Felde, and the Dornier is just amazing. I had to try the startup a few times before understanding how not to blow my transponder away but in the end I got it right.

 

You can't understand my surprise when I came back after a flight and found out, during the following one, that my Pitot Heat wasn't working. Asked my mechanic, and found out I forgot it on after landing, which lead to the device being overheated and consequently broken. :)

That's the spirit I guess. The Do still is great in those terms. Quite a few items took me by surprise on the first attempts and, in the consequence, I was able to learn about their operation. So it even serves an educational purpose.

I would get the Katana but it's too slow. The Do-27 has always tempted me though

 

Lee

P.S.: if I could have your Turbine Duke with an Accu-Sim addition I'd buy it hands down.

 

If you mean partly "Accu-feel" as well as the excellent Accusim innovations, it's a good addon and adds a lot of emersion. But let's see what the Duke offers, because we don't often shout about it, but it is all described on our website, and I feel perhaps some on this forum simply haven't noticed a long list of innovations we offered years ago which are maybe not assumed to exist, and which we are still developing now. Our choice is to concentrate on flying qualities, followed by visual integrity, followed by gauge smoothness and sounds, while at the same time offering reasonable frame rate performance for mid range systems.

 

We were the first developer to incorporate many features that are only just beginning to be used elsewhere, and it can be a little frustrating at times that some simmers are either unaware of them, or perhaps don't actually notice these things, but here, for once, I will declare some of the things you may have missed:

 

The Dukes, as all our aircraft do, will spin and sideslip. This is not a gimmick but something we were first to implement after hundreds of hours of experimentation and research and which we feel is enormously important for a GA aircraft. FSX's flight engine is just not made to do this, but we have refined and honed our innovations in this regard. The reason I think it is important is because almost all GA aircraft WILL spin if you abuse them, and having a rudder that does not properly give flexibility and flow is not at all real. High on the list of GA aircraft accidents is loss of lift and flight while low and slow on approach, or in inclement weather. Very few aircraft for FSX apart from ours will be able to side slip on a high approach, or be induced to spin, because yaw is not properly done in FSX. We have overcome this, and did so about 10 years ago, but we are still refining it.

 

Simmers use addons for a variety of reasons. We tend to appeal to those who feel that aircraft behaviour in moving, dynamic air is the most important thing to get right. Many, many aircraft are fine for taking off, climbing, cruising and landing within a quite limited framework. But many of them have "stuck" rudders which do not behave properly. Few of them will drop a wing after a stall. Few of them stall properly. Almost none of them, with noble exceptions, can be provoked to spin. Many users never even notice these things because they fly around within sensible and safe scenarios making little demand on the limits of what any aircraft should be able to do.

 

We were first to introduced stall buffet effects quite a few years ago. We were also the first developer to implement pilot inertia effects in pitch and acceleration. We did this before Microsoft themselves copied this innovation and implemented it in FSX after we had done so in FS9, as far as I recall.

 

We were the first developer to introduce airframe stress sounds (in our FSX Spitfire) and believable engine failure. We were one of the first developers to introduce completely smooth gauge movement that was free from Microsoft's standardised gauge frame rate and linked our gauge needles to the core frame rate of the sim itself. Thus if you can achieve 35 fps then our gauges will run also at this speed, as opposed to the default 8-12 fps. We did this over seven years ago and it is only recently that others have done the same.

 

We were the first developer to properly separate stereo engine sounds so they did not produce a phase-induced noise signal cancellation effect that most coventional stereo-pair sounds produce in FSX. We were also one of the first developers to successfully map prop sounds so they were separate from engine sounds in the way they reacted to turbo engine and prop settings (Turbine Duke).

 

Many more innovations came from us and they are too many to list. We have not explored things like fuses and other maintenance features because we feel our other features are more important for the vast majority of simmers and real pilots who first and foremost want a believable flight model and effective sounds, plus readable gauges with a wealth of view alternatives, and the latter did away with the need for 2d panels which in our view were never realistic, though I recognise that for complex jet airliners or multi screen setups they can be useful.

 

What Accusim/Accufeel has done is to cleverly bring together many of these already achieved innovations, added a couple of their own and offered them in one package. Kudos to them.

 

Our aircraft appeal to pilots with some experience, and many of those pilots are looking for an authentic FLYING experience. If we had the time and energy to produce aircraft which not only had our current features, but also had endless other features like engine inspections, servicing, electrical failures and other stuff, we might address them, but only after more basic features we feel are very important, have first been sorted out. It is a bit frustrating to me that some simmers appear not to value the improvements we have tirelessly worked on for many years.

Excellent post! :Applause:

I would get the Katana but it's too slow. The Do-27 has always tempted me though

 

In terms of cruise speed and climb speed, how does the Katana compare to the default Cessna 172?

A few knots slower on cruise, a bit faster rate of climb. Pretty much the same.

Thanks, nuNce.

That Duke sounds like something not to be missed. Yes, i do value being able to do a slip. I learned to do this in RL and have always tried to replicate in FSX to no effect. Thank you for covering all the innovations in such detail.

The best in my opinion when it comes to the overall package:

 

RealAir Duke (both versions, phenomenal FDE)

Milviz C310 (incredible FDE as well, but falls a little short of the Duke because of no native RXP GPS integration)

A2A Accusim Piper Cub (awesome yet very slow, VFR only)

Aerosoft Katana (native RXP GPS integration, rivals Accusim features, awesome visuals, not IFR certified, a little slow)

I would like to add that the lack of IFR certification for the Katana is due to plastic airframe, not lack of instrumentation.

Really? Didn't know that. Why would plastic not be allowed for IFR?

It is because GRP is prone to severe lightning damage and it is difficult to protect it against that. What happens is that the foam filling in GRP wings can contain moisture, and so it is similar to what happens when lightning strikes a tree, i.e. the sap boils as the electricity routes through it, it expands rapidly and blows the tree apart, or in the case of GRP wings with a foam core, blows them apart.

 

It has happened one or twice with gliders that I know of, one guy didn't even have to bail out, one minute he was strapped in the glider, next minute he was dropping through the air and pulling his 'chute, the glider came down in pieces. That's why I was especially worried when I got caught in a lightning storm in an SZD-50 once, since I was too low to bail out LOL

 

Al

I would like to add that the lack of IFR certification for the Katana is due to plastic airframe, not lack of instrumentation.

 

Can you expand on this? It doesn't make any sense. Cirrus is composite (I used to build them), and they are certified for IFR flight...

Can you expand on this? It doesn't make any sense. Cirrus is composite (I used to build them), and they are certified for IFR flight...

 

From Wikipedia: "Although the DA20 is available with instrumentation and avionics suitable for flight under instrument flight rules (IFR), its plastic airframe lacks lightning protection and thus does not qualify for IFR certification.^[2]"

 

^{Apparently though, composite aircraft can be modified to have lightning strike protection. Perhaps that is the case with the Cirrus?}