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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)?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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