Nose jiggle

[Duedel]

Need your advice. If I apply rudder to get the con into my gunsight I notice a little jiggle that make it very hard to hit him. My joystick settings are OK but I use a MS Sidewinder Pro without pedals. Do you think it advisable for me to use pedals instead of joystick to minimize the nose jiggle effect? Does pedals have a great effect on gunery?

[Apar]

What are your joystick settings for the rudder?

It sounds to me like you need to put a bit more damping into the rudder response. I put about 15-20% damping on the rudder settings, it helped allot.

[Duedel]

I have played with damping a lot and my rudder setting looks similar to the settings you can see at the help pages of AH. Damping is set to about 10%. I'm pretty sure that this is OK. I have good control and feel over roll and pitch but not over rudder cause it's the third axis on my stick and this seams to be one axis to much for my hand . Furtheron I noticed this jiggling that might be caused by the settings or the lack of control I don't know.
So does rudder pedals ensure more control over yaw as a 3 axis joystick where the third axis is the pivot axis?

[Andy Bush]

Duedel

Using rudder to correct aim is something I often see mentioned. The technique is a little more involved than just moving the pipper over to the target. The gunsight "lies" whenever any yaw is present...the technique can be made to work, but the pilot needs to understand how.

SimHQ has a new rudder article that covers this subject...and their Air Combat Corner has other articles that explain the pros and cons of using rudder when firing the guns.

I use TM Elite pedals and find that the level of fine control over the rudder is not very good...the inputs are too "coarse" for the kind of precision inputs needed when trying to adjust the pipper aiming point.

FWIW...I knew people in RL that talked about this as well. I've tried it and thought the technique was mostly unworkable.

I'm aware of certain stories that have come out of WW2 about how some pilots used this technique in A2A. The accounts are pretty bare of detail, and I'd like a little more info before I believed the whole story.

For me, the bottom line is to fly the plane as it was meant to be flown...adjust pipper with pitch and roll. If a last second correction has to be made with rudder, then the pilot had better know what he's doing, otherwise he's going to just waste a lot of ammo!

Andy

[Duedel]

Andy and Apar thank you very much for your response. So I'll save me 100€ and instead spend 2 hours on reading the always excellent artikles at SimHQ.
Thanks again guys

[Apar]

I use CH Pedals Pro. With most planes in AH they respond pretty stable to rudder input (with some damping though). Only a few planes like the yak and the 262 make the plane 'jiggle' on rudder input.

Although I totally respect the posts from Andy on not using rudder for aiming,  I developed a habbit of doing so, especially in front quarter attacks. It seems to work for me most of the times. But I'm not using the gunsight in those cases (I hardly use em at all). Like with most things if done repeately you develop a feeling for it.
Whether it gives me a big advantage or not is hard to say, it depends very much on the way you fight a2a and the specific situation in such a fight.
I'd say go for using the gunsight and not using rudder for aiming and develop basic a2a combat skills. Once your 100% comfortable with that you can still try out not using gunsight and using rudder to aim and even not to use tracers.



Apar

[AKIron]

Originally posted by Andy Bush
Duedel

Using rudder to correct aim is something I often see mentioned. The technique is a little more involved than just moving the pipper over to the target. The gunsight "lies" whenever any yaw is present...the technique can be made to work, but the pilot needs to understand how.

Andy

Andy, I'm sure you're aware that in AH the gunsight is nothing more than the boresight of the guns. I'm assuming your statement about the gunsight being inaccurate when yaw is introduced is based on your knowledge/assumption that airflow is modeled for and affects individual bullets. This is the case for rockets and may also be so for bullets. Is that your knowledge/assumption?

Edited: Just occured to me that airflow isn't the only dynamic involved. Relative motion of the a/c to the direction of the fired bullets is also a factor. The more yaw, the more lead required.

[FLS]

All aircraft in AH will roll with rudder input. This is how you can bank to turn with no ailerons. All fighters in AH except the P-38 and Me 262 will respond to rudder input with a pitch change due to gyroscopic precession. So in addition to the yaw induced roll you also see the nose pitch up or down while the nose is moving sideways. Whether it goes up or down depends on the direction of yaw and direction of prop rotation. I don't know what's causing the jiggle you describe but as you can see there are reasons why the nose seems unstable when you use the rudder regardless of your settings or equipment.

--)-FLS----
Musketeers

[Andy Bush]

AKIron

Yes, I am.

As you said, anytime the gun line is not aligned with the relative wind, the bullets tend not to go where the pilot thinks they will.

Some of this is due to aerodynamic effects (the rounds aligning themselves with the airflow) and some of it is due to vector summation (the velocity vector of the round and firing aircraft not in alignment).

It all adds up to an impact point that is not where the pilot thinks. The corrective action is for the pilot to "overlead" in the direction of travel to bring the impact point back to where he wants.

The problem with this technique is that rudder control is far less precise than pitch and/or roll input. Our size 12 footsies are not quite as discriminating on the pedals as our hand on the stick is (for any number of reasons). This may not be so significant in sim HOTAS setups where rudder can be modeled to the stick twist grip or throttle switch/knob.

In RL, every now and then I would hear about someone "kicking the rudder" when strafing to improve his aim. Then I tried it one day...being young and foolish and willing to try anything that I heard at the bar.

Well...I only did it once! I sprayed rounds all over the place and came away with the firm conviction that aiming properly in the first place was a much better gameplan.

This aiming error is present in all unguided weapon delivery...guns, rockets, or bombs. The sight "lies" to you regardless of weapon type.

One minor correction. The gunsight in AH (or any other sim or in RL) is not the "boresight". The gunsight aiming point, sometimes called the pipper, is the convergence point. The "boresight" is just that...the extended line of the barrel into space. The pipper is set to indicate where the path of the projectile intersects the desired range and convergence and is a function of time of flight/gravity drop. Usually, the boresight of the gun is therefore "above" the pipper. The process of setting this up is called "harmonization". The term "boresight" comes from the optical device that is used to literally look through the barrel when aligning the gun during the harmonization procedure. The optical device is inserted into the gun chamber ("bore") and then looked through (sighted") at a fixed target at a predetermined distance in front of the aircraft.

Andy

[Raubvogel]

Duedel....I've flown with both pedals and with a twist rudder on my stick. Well, now the pedals are collecting dust in my closet. I found that I get much better and more precise rudder control from the twist rudder. I set my dampening way up and also set the dead zone up about 20%.

[elstevie]

I went from a MS twisty to pedals man it made world of differance.

[Mino]

Strictly concerning AH.

I find that at times I can give the rudder a quick stomp and make my rounds hit.   This is the case where I am being engaged or engaging for a front quarter shot.  I have also gotten hits from a six attack where my closure was pretty fast.  If am going to miss anyway I might stomp the rudder hoping to get lucky.

A well timed hard rudder stomp will swing my nose over just long enough to get hit sprites.   This is not really any move you can plan on completing.  More of a reactionary move without any conscious thought involved.

The first and only time I ever shot down HiTech I did this.  We were engage for a HO merge, both of us pulling pretty hard for a lead turn.  Neither realling intending on a firing pass.   At the last second I just stomped the rudder and got lucky hits.   KerSplash!

[spiffykraits]

For anyone using CH Pedals through the gameport (not usb) there can be a problem that the rudder will be overly sensitive, and possibly "spiky", giving some excessive nosebounce on even small inputs.  If using a gameport system easiest way I found was to use the CTFJ program from

http://home.att.net/~stickworks/

to reduce the overal throw of the rudder. I leave the stick as is but reduce the throw on my rudder to 65% which is more than sufficient for ground handling as well as flight.  Calibrate in AH with CTFJ set at default full throws, then reduce rudder throw with CTFJ and store it as a file and load that up when flying.  CTFJ needs to be running in the sys tray for it to apply.  CTFJ also has a neat scaler that reduces input about the center position equally each side so I tend to use that rather than AHs own scaler.

[Duedel]

Have played with my rudder settings (increased damping to about 20%) and managed to get better control over it. Further on it helped me a lot to read Andys article. I guess its always better if you know what to do and why

[Seeker]

Are you using the Sidewinder profiler?

I found that on my system the profiler introduced a tiny delay to stick inputs, which made things more twitchy.

If you are, try disabling it and using the built in key mapper instead - with the "stick sets" function it givres you more functionality any way.

I found it helped (a bit, at least).