Ok, did some test flying with v1.1. Here's some feedback.
The aircraft is capable of some astonishing things, for example when you fly to about 30,000 ft and accelerate to +2000 km/h (TAS) and initiate a zoom climb, these are the results...
Climbed to altitude of 10000 metres with drop tank on, and accelerated to 2155 km/h which seemed to be the top speed with DT on. Dropped the tank, and she slowly accelerated to 2250 km/h. At this speed it is rather hard to maintain flight level.
After reaching about that top speed I initiated a vertical climb.
She climbs like a rocket; at 20,000 metres altitude she's still doing about 1600 km/h. At 30,000 km, upward speed was still 578 km/h but at about that point she started to pitch down since air was too thin for control surfaces to maintain vertical attitude.
Peak altitude was approximately 31,370 metres, at which point the velocity was merely 193 km/h. Notably, the aircraft feels very stable and I have so far been unable to put her in unrecoverable flight state.
Both unaccelerated and accelerated stalls are very benign and stable. The aircraft is not prone to tip stalling, instead in unaccelerated stall the nose simply starts to gently drop once airspeed goes too low. Accelerated stalls (as in loading the wing to critical angle of attack and beyond by pitching up) are very stable as well, and positive control over all main axes (pitch, roll, yaw) are maintained.
Spins can be initiated with neutral aileron, full elevator up, and rudder at either direction. If these controls are maintained for sufficiently long time, the aircraft will enter a flat spin, rotating about her vertical axis. Spin recovery seems to work best with low throttle setting, neutral ailerons, elevator down and opposite rudder. She recovers well enough, but obviously takes quite a bit of altitude to do so. I initiated spin at about 4500 metres altitude and recovered at 2400. The official guideline was, apparently, to bail if aircraft was out of control below 10,000 ft (about 3000 metres) and I can see why.
I was doing my flight testing with the F-4D with 50% internal fuel load, one drop tank used for initial climb and acceleration, then I dropped the fuel tank and tested the aircraft with low wing loading. (I dropped the bombs in the loadout as the sortie started).
Jettison stores does not work on my installation currently, but I remember seeing issues with it reported by other players. Will look into it.
I also noticed that once in-flight, the hydraulic system remains operative despite loss of both engines due to fuel starvation. Is this intentional? Does the aircraft have a ram air scoop, or does it generate hydraulic power with an APU? I don't know the hydraulics/power system layout for the F-4, but usually APU's generate pneumatic pressure and electricity required to run the aircraft and start the engines, and hydraulic pressure is derived from main engines. If the APU was used to generate hydraulic pressure, then maybe a third engine with zero thrust could be added to the flight model. It would be great to also have batteries and generators simulated (no APU or engines, you run on batteries only; with APU or engine generators online the batteries recharge).
Does the game support variable hydraulic pressure? As in, if you have lower hydraulic pressure, the control inputs would be more sluggish and you would have reduced blowback limits, too. Or is the hydraulics more of an on/off thing at the moment?
Actually it makes sense that with no hydraulic power, the airbrakes wouldn't come out in-flight; the dynamic pressure would keep them retracted. However I fully expected loss of control after running out of fuel.
Also, flaps seem to be unaffected by the hydraulic system. Is this accurate? Were the flaps electrically actuated in the Phantom? If not, then I think flaps should also be fully down with no hydraulic pressure.
With the flight surfaces still functioning despite loss of engine power (and hydraulic pressure, assumedly), deadstick landings are doable but require quite steep approach to keep your speed up, use airbrakes (again with no hydraulic pressure this would be impossible) to control airspeed, and flare above threshold.
There is a strange glitch when opening canopy; wrong part of the 3D model disappears from the view, namely the front window frame. This looks especially strange as the round rivets or whatever they are remain in place, hovering in mid-air in front of the pilot. The actual canopy frame remains in view around the pilot. The rear pilot's canopy can be seen opening and closing.
One of the new pilot textures is a 256^2 texture and the other is a 512^2 texture. Both are indexed TGA's. Brief testing shows that 24-bit TGA works just as well, at least on my installation. Might be worth looking into, considering the increase in quality with 24bit colours compared to indexed colours, and the filesize increase is not substantial either way. GPU-wise, indexed and 24-bit textures of identical resolution consume the same amount of video memory, so I would advocate using as little indexed textures as possible.
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Topic: F-4 Phantom II's released v1.31 for Jetwar1.2 (17/10/2012) (Read 284893 times)
