15 hours ago, tutmeister said:

Oh I know about that and own accufeel, just wondered if you felt the lanc bwas hugely improved by it or if there were any negatives.

I now own it and spent a couple of hours playing around with it. Thumbs up!

Chris

I suspect AccuFeel might need some fine tuning to find a good balance between adding to the experience and making it maybe a bit too loose or dangerously noisy. There's no doubt you'd get a lot of wind noise in Lancaster and four Merlin engines are certainly going to be loud, probably to the extent of damaging your hearing with prolonged exposure to them.

Of course there are plenty of videos of the BoBMF's PA474 for us to check out and use as a guide, but we have to remember that PA474 is one of only two airworthy Lancasters left and is therefore quite rightly treated somewhat gently and very well serviced indeed. Wartime ones, whilst obviously receiving maintenance, would nevertheless not have had such care and attention lavished upon them, nor would their engines have been treated so gently because spares were plentiful and still in production, so there's quite a bit of leeway for AccuFeel to portray something a bit war weary, or something straight out of the factory or maintenance hangar.

I've seen the BoBMF's Lancaster on a regular basis, pretty much throughout my entire life actually, since like nearly all RAF WW2 bombers, she has a connection with the NW and so is a frequent visitor to the skies near me. It's obvious from those many observations I've made that she is flown with care and not at the kind of throttle settings wartime pilots would have used, nor with the kind of Gs wartime pilots would have put on their airframes when pulling corkscrews and such. That's a luxury we can allow ourselves in this one though!

Edited August 30, 20187 yr by Chock

Off-topic, Alan, just a wee question if you have the original JF DC-8 50-70 series that was first released for FSX and then upgraded to P3D v4.

Tried the Tutorial last night. All went well, except the push-back Shift+P went the opposite way; and taxi-ing out it seemed to want to gallop away despite the throttle being turned fully down. Any ideas why this is happening?

Noticed a couple of bugs, not reported yet. I can start this up with ctrl e (yes I know! it was just to speed things up for a test flight. Starting a lanc takes a long time you know!!) and the fuel cocks on the engineers panel were off and all the mags were off yet it was still running. If you switch the mags on then off the engine will stop.

When engines are running you can again turn the engineer panel fuel cocks to off and it keeps running.

Anyone else found anything odd?

Am also having difficulty starting it up if i use the cold and dark option on menu 1.

 

Chris

I wasn't able to start the lanc today, I thought everything had been switched on, but in the end I had to use ctrl+e. it started straight away. I struggle to keep the lanc straight and level, anyone had that problem.

Would like to find the panel light switch, there seems to be a couple of lights. I found the Haynes manual for the Lanc a help. Ed Straw's description on flying a display is good.

Anyone's comments on flying her would be great

Regarding the lights, see this bit below in bold taken directly from the manual, which amongst other things points out that the last thing you really wanted on a Lancaster bomber over the Ruhr at night was a big greenhouse cockpit lit up like a christmas tree, effectively saying: 'Coooeee Fritz, here we are!'...

LIGHTING 
 The Lancaster's internal lighting system consisted of mainly torch-style individual panel lights, illuminating various areas of the cockpit and fuselage interior. It was important, for obvious reasons, to minimise internal lighting only to vital areas such as instrumentation (most instruments had luminous markings) and major operating panels. The navigator had a separate map lamp and there were up to four torch lamps in the bomb aimer's station to illuminate the various switches. 
 
There is a small switch panel mounted in the centre of the main canopy, just ahead of the escape hatch. This has a group of rotational switches (two are inoperative) for panel lights and a set of cabin lights we have provided (not fitted to the real aircraft) for better vision of the interior at night. This ‘cabin lighting’ makes use of the standard simulator VC (virtual cockpit) lighting effect which can be quite flat and unrealistic. 
 
NOTE The general cabin lighting can only be used if you modify the Aircraft CFG file. Under the lighting section, you will find the list for these lights, it looks like this: 
 
 [lights] 
 
//Types: 1=beacon, 2=strobe, 3=navigation, 4=cockpit, 5=landing 
 
//light.0 = 10,   3.91,   0.00,  3.20, fx_vclight, //light.1 = 10,   5.91,   0.00,  3.64, fx_vclight, //light.2 = 10,   9.91,   0.00,  3.64, fx_vclight, //light.3 = 10,   17.91,   0.00,  0.64, fx_vclight, //light.4 = 10,   -17.91,   0.00,  0.64, fx_vclight, 
 
Just remove the forward slashes from the beginning of each line and save the file. 

I have noticed it can be a bit picky with regard to starting it up, however, as an interim solution, if you start her up with Control+E and then cut the engines with (I think) Control+Shift+F1, then that will kind of reset things and you will be able to use the correct procedures to crank her up, not that it is especially complex to start a Lancaster up anyway, much of the real thing's controls and settings were automatic. Doing that is a bit quicker than resetting the flight or reloading the aeroplane, both of which will also sort out any starting issues.

As far as keeping the Lancaster straight and level is concerned, I've found it flies well and seems to handle as one would expect a big bomber to. I'd recommend having nose up and nose down trim commands on a couple of buttons on your stick or yoke, or if you don't have any spare buttons to assign, might want to take a look at this (fairly new) product, which works a lot more like how a real aeroplane is trimmed:

https://secure.simmarket.com/realtrim-professional-unique-new-trim-system-p3dv4.phtml

Much depends on the load (both fuel and payload). With full tanks and a big bomb load it will not be sprightly, but it will have a lot of inertia with all that weight and four propellers pulling it in a specific direction, and so you might find that big control deflections will be needed to get her to change her mind about which way she's going when at low speeds in the 90-135 miles per hour range when taking off and climbing, but at higher speeds the Lancaster was known to be quite light on the controls, which is good, but it does also mean it would need careful trimming.

WW2 Lancaster pilots generally said that once the bombs were gone and there was a lot less fuel on board, the Lancaster was fairly sprightly and could actually be chucked about quite a bit, which again would make me inclined to think she'd need fairly precise trimming to stay perfectly level, especially at light loads.

We tend not to think this is the case because the two remaining airworthy Lancasters which survive today (soon to be joined by a third one apparently) are generally treated with respect and flown gently as befits their age and rarity. Let's not forget we lost the only existing airworthy Mosquito when it was being chucked about at Barton Airshow and its Merlin engines bogged. But back in 1944 with the possibility of a Ju-88 night fighter coming up underneath you with upward-firing cannons, I think you'd have been inclined to stand the thing on its wingtips every once in a while with the throttles wide open, really hauling back on that stick, an evasive manouever which was common with the Lancaster. More than one Lancaster had its ailerons completely ripped off when performing evasive manouevers like that, but actually still made it back to base.

Edited September 4, 20187 yr by Chock