+ The wing stall angle was weird, as mentioned earlier. Values
greater than 45° don't have much physical meaning. I changed it to
25, which should be closer to a realistic value.
+ The lift="1.1" on the elevator flaps wasn't quite enough to get the
aircraft into the approach AoA. I changed it to 1.2, and it works.
It's still not as responsive as I'd have expected (then again, this
is a big aircraft...).
+ The hstab effectiveness was negative. This is wrong, as this is a
multiplier for all force generated by the surface. A surface with a
negative value will produce thrust instead of drag. :) Maybe this
was needed because the elevator was rigged backwards somewhere else?
I changed it
+ The wing and hstab had very small stall widths (very sharp stalls).
Low aspect wings should have gentle stalls, not sharp ones. I
changed it to 15 as a guess.
+ There's no rudder input mapped. This can be done with a "split"
input to the tails in exactly the same way that the aireron works on
the wing. It will simply add to the elevator input. V-tail
Bonanzas will require the same treatment.
Here's a 'beta' version of a YF23. The model is virtually finished - I think
I just need to split the wheel well and cockpit linings to clear up the
smoothing artifacts, and add a couple of other little details.
The texturing is rudimentary, all I've done is to map simple colour blocks to
everything. There's a definite problem with the rear cockpit canopy
transparency - anything viewed through it, except for the pilot stuff and the
rear canopy surround is invisible. The weird thing is that everything is ok
if you angle the view to look through the front canopy - this is easier to do
with the rear canopy open (parking brake). The front and rear canopy
glasses, and hud glass are the only transparent objects, and they're all at
the bottom of the hierarchy.
I'd found that if I placed objects below any transparent objects in the
hierarchy, they'd become invisible when viewed through the transparent object
- any objects above the transparent objects would be visible. This seems to
have worked for the front canopy and hud (the pilot and seat is visible from
the front view through both the front canopy and the hud glass) but not the
rear canopy.
Time for a bit more experimentation, methinks. That, or find TFM to R:)
I've finally got the u/c door/gear timing working, and I'm also pleased with
the suspension animation. I couldn't resist linking the pilot's head to the
rudder - it's not as though it does anything, except on the ground (where it
also operates the nose wheel steering.
It all still needs some tuning and finishing - I've modelled the front wing
flaps/slats/what-ever-they-ares and I've put some slats in the fdm, but I
haven't 'used' them yet. The suspension is still too spongey and it heels
over quite badly on take-off in cross-winds (shows off the independent main
suspension nicely though), and more work on the fdm is needed too.
