OK here goes... As said I changed quite some things on the G.18V, some of which I consider real corrections or enhancements and some that are mainly to my own liking. Due to the detail it's impossible to keep this brief.
Panel generalStarting with the panel, having tooltips active in FS certainly helps a lot. Not just to find out what everything does while looking around the flight deck but also to have precise values displayed dynamically under your cursor. The latter may be regarded as cheating but I use it as a substitute for PNF reading gauges, for instance. I did add/enhance tooltip code in the xml of the gauges for carb air temperature, fuel pressure (metric values won't work there) and prop feather pressure.
For navigation, as mentioned earlier, I removed the GPS panel - and the Bendix-King panel with it too - and added the Rechenblatt by Hauke Keitel (KeDI). I did a simple resize of the vintage radio stack panel to fit the 16:10 monitor.
GaugesAs I found it very hard to fly without some essential information I asked the engineers to fix me some extra gauges to the panel. Room for them was made by carefully removing Marilu's photo (and sticking it to captain Manuele's locker at Mirafiori
). Added were fuel quantity gauges by Stefano Meneghini (PCMeneg), displaying a percentage of tank contents but with a tooltip for contained fuel weight. Another version of the same gauge is the one bottom left on the copilot's panel, more on that one later.
Added in the same space was a flap indicator, also by mr. Meneghini, that is used in the S.73. The only other indication of flap position is where the handle is and I found that too difficult to 'read' while flying.
I also added the Ice Gauge by Charles (Dutch) Owen in the space of some simicons that I removed and of course Rob Barendregt's engine and door select gauge. The latter is well known here and the former adds a great deal of realism = serious trouble, especially in freezing rain conditions! Its visual indicator is the substitute for FS9 not generating any visible ice on aircraft surfaces.
In the .air file, I changed the Oil Temp Scale Factor from 0.9 to 1 in record 543, because my impression was the oil stayed too cool.
Finally, I gave up on using the genuinely hard to read speed indicator as it was. I am OK with the funny scaling but I always was trying to deploy flap and gear while being too fast as no matter how hard I tried, that needle seemed to tell me a lower value than was true. I then rotated the scale = background image to have the needle sit at ca. 12 kmIAS more and now I'm fine. Corrected a typo in the gauge xml as well.
FuelIndeed the G.18V has six tanks modeled, called Left, Left Aux. and Left tip + the same for Right in the Aircraft/Fuel and Payload menu. The real aircraft had front, rear and reserve (Anteriore, Posteriore and Riserva) tanks and that is what's displayed on the fuel tank selectors for each side. However, AFAIK selecting Anteriore results in
all left tanks being fed to the corresponding engine, selecting Posteriore in
all right tanks being fed to it and selecting Riserva brings
no fuel to the corresponding engine. I have a tooltip on it saying that Left/Right/Aux is selected, which is therefore closer than the ('historically correct') labels to what it does but still not correct. Therefore, I always fly with Anteriore selected on the left and Posteriore on the right one.
The fuel gauge on the copilot's panel reacts only to the left fuel selector switch and indicates what that is actually selecting, so again not what its labels say is selected. I did have fuel flow indicators installed for a while in stead of this gauge, for testing. While flying, I never had much more of a clue than 'still have some left' of how I was doing fuel wise, until it dawned on me just recently that I should calculate how much I am suppose to have left at specific moments, like TOC, TOD and over the IAF. I do that now, it works great and I removed the FF gauges the plane likely never had (and, so I learned, didn't need either - I flatter myself with the idea FSAviator would forgive me a cheat for learning this).
AirframeIn the aircraft.cfg I rearranged the fuel tanks based on a G.18 schematic drawing, hoping that leads to a somewhat more realistic W&B as they are drained. However, they are all feeding together per side as said, so that might be the exact reason for the numbers that are in the original. This is what I made of it, and I haven't noticed any significant difference (of course
):
[fuel]
...
LeftMain = 0.6, -4.6, 0, 77, 0 \\ fwd tanks btn engine and fuselage, 40% of total fuel
RightMain = 0.6, 4.6, 0, 77, 0
LeftAux = -3.3, -5.2, 0, 96, 0 \\ rear tanks slightly more outb, 50% of total fuel
RightAux = -3.3, 5.2, 0, 96, 0
LeftTip = 3.9, -4.6, 0, 19, 0 \\ reserv tanks, leading edge, 10% of total fuel
RightTip = 3.9, 4.6, 0, 19, 0
For quite some time, I couldn't figure out why the master ignition switch wouldn't work. Eventually, it occured to me. The following line was missing:
[GeneralEngineData]
...
master_ignition_switch = 1
I'm also doing some trials with the electrical system, as I keep running out of power to start on the ground despite the 'electric_always_available = 1' already there. Not finished yet.
UndercarriageAs explained in the notes, FSAviator made the tailwheel a steering one. It says to alter a certain point's value to 0 in the aircraft.cfg under [contact_points], but I believe that makes it a fixed tail wheel. I changed the value to 180 and now it castors, because it swings both ways for 180 degrees I assume. Ground steering remains challenging. 'Blowing the tail around' like on a plane with an engine on the centreline doesn't work, I suppose because the engines' slip streams hardly touch the tail fin. (I even tried altering some values in the .air file to make it more responsive but to no avail.) Differential power does work, as does differential braking. Having a throttle quadrant and pedals hugely helps here (and, together with a yoke, adds immensely to realism).
Last but certainly not least, and congrats if you've made it this far, is one of the most significant modifications I arrived at. This concerns the contact points and the so-called bouncing or porpoising you may experience with this plane. There had been some debate on I think Sim-Outhouse and the outcome is in the FSAviator Archive on this forum: a new value for empty_weight_pitch_MOI under [weight_and_balance]. While that is the value I use, as it was recommended by the FDE himself as a correction, it didn't solve the problem for me. I think I remember Volker Boehme* mentioning he 'broke the plane upon taxiing in' and I noticed even cycling views in FS would have the Fiat jump and skid on its tyres.
* Volker's name comes up more than once if you read into 1930s aviation. Dankeschön für alle nützliche Infos Volker!
After a while I learned to retract flap even before lowering the tail wheel upon landing, that would keep
me from breaking the plane during the roll-out. This was not satisfactory though and eventually, through SOH and FSDeveloper, I learned about static compression and compression ratio. It turned out the default values give the G.18V a very stiff gear, despite the mention of soft springs in the reference docs. When I changed that, all was good. It also turned out the model animation caters for the now increased strut suppression. So here are my first three points, including the castoring tail wheel and tyres that compress on the ground a bit more than before.
[contact_points]
...
point.0 = 1, -30.5, 0, -3.0, 1200, 0, 0.8, 180, 0.21, 1.67, 0.8, 8, 8, 0, 108, 108 // tail
point.1 = 1, 1.1, -9, -10.1, 1200, 1, 1.8, 0, 0.35, 1.26, 0.8, 11, 12, 2, 108, 108 // LH main
point.2 = 1, 1.1, 9, -10.1, 1200, 2, 1.8, 0, 0.35, 1.26, 0.8, 12, 13, 3, 108, 108 // RH main
The remaining points have some oddities too. There are two points
below the wing tips, I can't relate those to the prop discs for instance, and one
in the fail fin. They shouldn't bother your while flying though.
Well, that's about it
(... shrimp sandwich ...). I made a checklist too, with the DC-3 as an example and handling notes integrated. In case anyone is interested I attach it here.
G18V Checklist.pdf (23.23 KB)
A last additional credit relating to the screen shots and flights: the great
www.timetableimages.com and the Classic Static and other invaluable objects libraries of course!
Erik
). Added were fuel quantity gauges by Stefano Meneghini (PCMeneg), displaying a percentage of tank contents but with a tooltip for contained fuel weight. Another version of the same gauge is the one bottom left on the copilot's panel, more on that one later.
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