Originally posted by SlapShot
Because it total BS.
If a WWII pilot were to ...
pull the land-trout flip-flop (explained by Jetb)
or the overexagertated wing wave (109s, 190s, and F-4Us are famous for this)
or my favorite to watch ... the porpoise (favored by Spit and P-51 pilots)
... they would probably have blacked out, and/or knocked themselves out with their head bouncing around in the cockpit like loose change, and/or in the case of the porpoise, their eyes would have bled out from the repeated negative Gs ... yet in a game such as this, there is no real penalty that can be delivered or determined.
Better modeling of real flight conditions would help but not for the reasons stated nor would the results be what you'd expect.
As I understand it, stick stirring is just rapping the stick around as fast as you can to confuse the game and cause the aircraft to appear in random positions. This is pretty easy to do in the game since we can't model true flight control feel correctly (stick force per G is a good example). In other words, it's a hell of a lot easier to slap my X-45 stick around like an epileptic bimbo than it is in a real plane which could take 10-30 lbs of force to move the stick it to it's limits. Likewise, the results of stick stirring in real life can only be approximated. Far from knocking the pilot out in real life, exactly the opposite will happen...basically nothing.
There is a measureable delay between a flight control input and response from the aircraft (change in pitch, roll, yaw). There are a lot of reasons for this as you'd expect but (gross oversimplification here) there are two main ones; slop in the flight control system and mass. Just because you move the stick doesn't mean you have an immediate and comparable movement of the flight control and physics tells us we can't instantaneously alter the path of an object in space. These add up to control system response time. If you move the stick from position A to position B and back again (stirring) faster than the response time nothing happens. As the speed of control movement is increased rapidity of aircraft movement increases only to the system response time afterwhich the responses decrease. If you can move the controls fast enough (as in stick stirring) essentially nothing happens.
Of course the controls do not "lock"either, and this is where modeling could be better. As soon as the control inputs decrease below the response time you begin to control the plane again. In the modeling, the controls lock for some period of time which is not realistic. More accurate modeling would just ignore inputs over a certain rate but immediately allow inputs less than that. Although it wouldn't "punish" the stick stirrer it would take away any reason to do it...i.e., stick stir and nothing happens.
We need to remember also that what is stick stirring to some may just be jinking to another. If someone has you in a gun solution (talking real life here), you'll do anything you can to get out of it. Break turns, snap rolls, high-G barrel rolls (both over the top and underneath) and negative-G push aways are all valid guns defenses and they're all based on the idea of generating high maneuver rates and unpredictable flight paths which by definition would make correct modeling difficult given the time delays inherent in the internet.
Mace
