WWII aircraft for Acceleration

[mfitch]

Has anyone used any WWII era aircraft with Acceleration? I have modified other aircraft to work with Acceleration by adding [tailhook] and [launch_assist] sections to the aircraft.cfg. However, when I tried this with a Corsair (Alpha Bleu Ciel model available here), it would not work on the catapult. When launch assist is called for (Ctrl-I using default key assignments) the plane begins to shake up and down then the catapult is disengaged.

Does being a tail drager make a difference perhaps (the shaking looks like the plane being level then the rear wheel falling to the deck)?

[Daube]

Err... a Corsair is not supposed to use the catapult anyway...  :-/

[Hagar]

Err... a Corsair is not supposed to use the catapult anyway...  :-/

Are you sure about that? http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:F4U-4_VF-113-114_CV-47_Korea.jpeg

I suspect mfitch is right about taildraggers in FSX though.

[an-225]

[quote][quote]Err... a Corsair is not supposed to use the catapult anyway...

[Daube]

[quote][quote]Err... a Corsair is not supposed to use the catapult anyway...

[mfitch]

The authenticity of the Corsair launch was not my concern. I don't have any other WWII naval aircraft at the moment. My interest is in testing whether the carrier I am designing if fully functional. Since it is a WWII escort carrier, I wanted to test with period aircraft rather than launching a reverse anacronism from it.

I wonder if I adjust the contact points to make it sit upright if I can test the mechanism. This will look even stranger, but should answer the question about the limitations of the Acceleration catapult programming. This I will try later.

[mfitch]

Confirmed. Acceleration cannot handle aircraft that are not level when resting on the ground. This matches with the animation possibilities which only work for the most modern catapult style. The WWII-Vietnam era catapults used cables attached to either side of the fuselage rather than a single connection to a front gear.

I suppose with sufficiently clever animation technique (conditional visibility) this might be achieved now, but it will be harder than necessary.

[Hagar]

I suspected as much. I seem to remember that the Arrestor Cable utility for FS2002/4 couldn't handle taildraggers.

WWII-Vietnam era catapults used cables attached to either side of the fuselage rather than a single connection to a front gear.

I believe most of them used a strop attached to the main undercarriage legs like this Hellcat.


The Wildcat appears to have a single cable attached to the lower fuselage.

[mfitch]

Thanks for the photos. I had seen the first arrangement, but not the second (Wildcat with single).