No pushback....

[Zaphod]

...with Thomas Ruth's excellant DC10? The tug approaches the nose wheel and seems to engage and then disconnects and wonders back to it's stand.
Any ideas?

Zaphod

[dave3cu]

Zaphod,

I haven't had any problems using pushback tug with the DC-10.

However, I can replicate your problem (with any aircraft) by holding the P too long

[Zaphod]

Hi Dave.
The plot thickens! Only two of the variants of the DC10 appear to have the push back problem. The KC10 and the Condor. All the others push back normally.
I'll have a look at the aircraft.cfg to see if I can spot anything obvious but to be honest I'm not sure what I'm looking for.

Zaphod

[Zaphod]

OK, it seems the two offending variants have an extra line in the "contact points" section. Line 3

point.3 = 1, -12.3114,  0.00,  -12.38, 1500, 2, 2.51,  0, 0.590, 2.849, 0.74,  9.1, 10.1,   3, 180, 250 //AUX Gear

Not sure what to do with this info

Zaphod.

[Zaphod]

Well, I //'d that line out and the KC10 now pushes back OK. Not sure what else may be affected but I'll report back if anything untoward occurs.

Zaphod

[dave3cu]

Zaphod,

Good find. Did some experimenting and this is my guess...

The tug animation needs to figure out where the nose gear is, based on the contact points, and looks for the gear located on the center line (lateral 0.00). As the Aux is also on center line (0.00), the sim apparently becomes confused and terminates the pushback routine.

I changed the lateral location to 0.01, to put it slightly off center, and pushback is ok. As far as I can tell the only advantage to this method, rather than //'ing the line, is it preserves the visual effects (touchdown, taxi) for the gear.

Dave

[Zaphod]

Nice one Dave.
I have applied your fix and it works just great.
Seems neater than my attempt.

Cheers.

Zaphod (Paul)