I have a techincal question: why do the instructions say to not use rudder to coordinate your turn. Do you not incur more drag by not coordinating?
Hi nrshida
That's a Good question, and apologies in advance for a less than technical response.
When I do the flight tests myself I wait until I've reached a sustained turn without losing or gaining altitude and use a stop watch to time at least five full 360 degree turns. My objective in the turn is to achieve the shortest time possible. I've found that attempting to coordinate the turn has a detrimental impact on the result.
When I've worked with other players to improve their turning ability, my metric for success is that I can no longer out turn them. I can normally achieve that after one or two sessions, but there have been times when I have just not been able to figure out why the other player just can't seem to match my turns. At some point I ask if they are coordinating their turns and if they say yes I have asked them to try and stop doing it. Their turning ability has always improved.
My advice in those cases is, don't do what should work, do what does work.
I suspect that in a sim we lack the physical and visual feedback needed to get it just right, combined with the fact you can't watch the ball (if you have one) and the bandit at the same time during a fight. So my guess is that over correction for adverse yaw with either too much rudder, or the right amount for too long, may be doing more harm than good. You can see how this might be true by noticing the significant impact that drag has on your speed with just a little too much rudder.
This has come up before and on the rare occasion when someone has claimed to be able to turn better while coordinating their turns, a quick visit to the training arena has confirmed otherwise
So it may just be that it's something that is difficult to get right, and that doing it badly does more harm than not doing it at all.
Even so, there are exceptions. I've been discussing sustained turns at constant altitude. However I've seen a real advantage in using the rudder during fairly steep diving and climbing turns, so much so that you can actually see the impact of it when others are doing it against you. But nothing I've ever attempted to flight test.
Give it a try, and let me know if you get different results?
If this is something you would like to experiment with in the TA I'd be happy to help?
Kind regards
Badboy
