I'll take a stab at it
1) "rudder hard over" a chilling warning to anyone who flies a 737 for a living. A stable plane reduced to tumbling aluminum within seconds. I found rudder input in AH can be taken to extremes without affecting stability. Infact uncoordinated rudder input seems more stable. I realize that a combat aircraft differs dramatically from a jetliner, also skidding a plane (both offense and defense) is an integral part of acm. Is the AH FM reasonably accurate in this aspect?
A 737 has swept wings which provide stability enough that the fin area can be reduced a bit. However, swept wings also have a nasty tip stall when you have any yaw on. There's also a ton of yaw inertia, once it gets going, it's hard to stop! Airliners also have a yaw damper, which provides most of an airliners yaw stability. It's usually turned on just after takeoff.
2) I took the "outside track" (lag pursuit) overtook drones (closing at 275 or so) till they 350-300 in front left view. Full rudder with cross control rotates nose so I have a 150-200 45 degree raking shot. Observed almost no counter swing thru 30 deg or more of rotation. Wouldn't something need to give or can plane rotate on lift from control surfaces only.
It's the lift from the fuselage that causes the yaw rate. The plane isn't continuing to skid. It skids maybe 15-20 degrees, then stabilizes. Any further rotation is just turning, wings level.
3) Almost no drag on above mentioned manv. seemed cabable of maintaining speed for prolonged periods.
It depends what that speed is. See if you can break 300 in level flight with full rudder deflection on. How come when you bank and crank at 150 mph, you don't slow down any more?
4) plane appeared controllable to stall speed and appeared to recover easily without traditional stick inputs.
Dihedral effect. The 'forward' wing is at a higher angle of attack than the 'backward' wing. It should stall first when you approach the stall from a steady state. If you suddenly apply yaw at near the stall, you may get the opposite effect, because then the yaw rate creates differential lift and can cause the backwards moving wing to stall first.
5) on overshoot rev of input + throttlechop resulted in multiple T's and more than one front aspect canopy shot. Almost feels like plane is rotating without use of lift surfaces, just control surfaces.
I can't quite visualize what you're getting at with this one.
[This message has been edited by wells (edited 10-10-2000).]
