ai aircraft on a carrier

[Bressand_1953]

Hi everyone
I have made an airport on a carrier and the ai aircrafts who are landing on this carrier are not able to follow the line of the taxi path because the radius of curvature are to small, and they go out of the area of the carrier. Is there any solution to force the ai aircraft to follow the center line of the taxi path.
Thank you in advance for your answers

[Bressand_1953]

I forgot to specify that is on P3D v5

[Firebird]

The normal reason that an aircraft can't make a turn is that its speed is too high.
Now rather than alter the default taxy speed the simple way around it is to add more normal nodes in the taxiway just before the turn. Each node slows the aircraft down. The slower the aircraft the tighter it turns.

Try that.

[Bressand_1953]

Thank you, I will try

[John Young]

You can also try increasing the nose wheel steering angle in the contact points in the aircraft.cfg file. If that doesn't help, you could then try decreasing the distance between the main wheels in the same section. If that doesn't help, you could try moving the nosewheel closer to the main wheels.

John

[Bressand_1953]

Sorry Steve, it's doesn't work. It doesn't seem to be a problem of speed. Thanks anyway. I will try the John solutions.

François

[Bressand_1953]

Thanks John, your third solution works very well. If I don't abuse your patience, do you also have a solution to increase the acceleration of the aircraft when it takes off on a short runway ?
Thanks you in advance

[John Young]

The simple answer to increasing acceleration, is that you can either reduce the weight of the aircraft (AI aircraft only use the "empty_weight" value) or increase the static thrust of the engines (or the thrust scalar). Changing any of these values, however, is likely to have consequences elsewhere. It's likely to influence how the aircraft approaches to land - its speed, it's attitude and stopping distance. You are then into playing with parameters like the lift scalars in the flaps settings and probably a few more in order to tame the approach.

The dilemma is very common in designing carrier-based (or "wet") FDEs, which are a science in their own right. By all means, try changing some of the values yourself, but do it one at a time and test a complete IFR circuit between changes. Once you have the circuit right, you should also test a point to point flight at altitude, to ensure the aircraft doesn't slow below the stall speed during the climb at the higher flight levels. Make sure you keep a note of previous values (use the "//" notation to make a note) so you can change back again.

There are a few people here who are more skilled than I am, in designing these types of FDEs and I am sure they will be glad to chip in with more detailed advice. Try a simple power setting change and observe what happens around the circuit, as a first step. You may then discover what else might need to change.

John

[Firebird]

I will try to explain some of the things to take into account, and this will deal only with the take off.

Firstly you have to deal with the acceleration off the deck, it has to take off shorter.
More power is the obvious thing, and as John says this can be used in conjunction with lower weight but it won't solve everything as they just fly straight off the deck. What you can do is increase the AoA at low speed to get the nose up quicker. This does not negate it flying off the runway but if you manage it right it looks more realistic. The bad news is that this can't be don't in the config file. It can only be down in the air file.

Now, your problems start right after take-off.
So assuming that you have just done the simple thing off increasing the power, with or without decreasing the weight.
The first big problem you hit is that you will exceed the gear retraction limit before the gear is up.
Now you can increase that limit but it looks wrong. I think that one of the first attempts I did the aircraft hit over 400 kts before the gear was up.

So to counteract that you have to reduce the acceleration. So you have to increase it and reduce it at the same time.
The way to decrease acceleration is to increase drag.
The optimum way to do this on take off is to increase drag on the gear. Note here that if you sim does use flaps on take off you have that option as well but FS9, for example does not. You can fool the sim to visually deploy flaps but nothing is altered in sim.

So keeping things simple you can increase drag on the gear, as this does not do anything when the aircraft is on the ground, and the gear can be up before the gear limit speed.

The next problem is that once the gear is up you need to slow the acceleration down or it will not be realistic, so then you have to increase drag according to speed.

If you manage to balance all this then you then have to watch the landing.
With the vast increase in power you may not be have much or any power applied on approach, therefore you could get issues with the aircraft slowing down. Then the gear comes down. Massive increase in power required to offset the drag. If you have a sim which can have an effect which will trigger according conditions you could easily get the afterburners come in on approach.

Finally, for the post-take off flight characteristics you need to alter things so that the land-based and sea-based characteristics are in the same ball park or it will be obvious to anybody that uses them.

Finally, carrier-based aircraft can't be sent to land bases and land based aircraft can't be sent to carriers. The two just can't mix for obvious reasons.

To summarise I deliberately said that I would only deal with take offs. You will note that I mentioned other parts of the flight regime but this is only to show how what you do for take offs changes every part of the envelope.

A simple solution would be to get Rob B's catapult xml to work for AI aircraft. The last thing I heard it would only work for flyable aircraft.