Poll: improved engine modeling

[Saintaw]

geez, yet another book to read if that comes in  

I vote put it in, but leave ano Option open!

[Pepino]

YES!!  

Pepe

[Glasses]

AGREED FULL ENGINE MANAGEMENT!

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Glasses---I may have 4 eyes ,but you only have one wing.

[marcof]

This reminds me of a time whilst flying in W/B with 249 RAF, a certin Czech pilots through to many high G moves and his engine packed in!!!, no there was no cons, we were alone about 8 planes in formation and this pilot was rolling and climbing and diving in & outa our formation area.
Marcof

[Weave]

European Air War modeled engine over heat.

I agree we should see a power loss from overheating if the throttle is left wide open too long.

Aside from the imersion factor, climbing to nosebleed alts will take much longer, so that should cure the Lanc at 35k syndrome.

Weave

[Mayhem]

Again to many varables.  I wouldn't mind cowl flaps and fuel mixtures but thats also 2 things more I have to map to my rig.

I vote no.

[Westy]

 I would like some more complication. Eng over heat for instance.

 For those who keep saying it's a game and should be just for fun so you 'diss' the folks who want more realism?  Well, you already have AW and FA as choices if all you want is fun and no realism. And they're $10/mo to boot.

  -Westy

[Wanker]

I say "Yes" for overheating engines, and an even larger "YES!" for some more detailed engine damage models. I'll finally know I'm in Flight-sim heaven when I take a round or two in the engine, and have to nurse a sputtering, missing, smoking engine back to base, while trying to see through the oil spray on my windshield.

[popeye]

I vote yes to engine overheating.  However, I don't know what the result of overheating should be.  Reduced power?  Total engine failure?  Harsh words from the crew chief?

[lazs]

pop.... the result was shortened time to overhaul.  At the least, planes that had used their water injection were checked out pretty thorougly after a mission.  All the Pratt powered planes would run the water tank dry without damage in allmost every case.   Some Pratts ran full power for 20 min after the oil pressure had been lost.   Sorties flown in the Pacific sometimes were so close to enemy bases that the planes were left at full military power for the entire time.

Sure, add it but it would be a non factor.  20-30 minutes at full military power and 10 min wep should be ok under most conditions.
lazs

[Ice]

As a guy who used to fly in RL, I would love to see more attention given to these areas. The idea of configuring the game to suit you preference is a fine thing as well....will HT do this? Who knows...perhaps if we continue to present it in a positive way, he might give it some consideration.

What strikes me is that they are currently so busy working on other aspects of the game and most likely don't have time.

Maybe someday

Ice

[jedi]

I'll bet you could generally run almost all of these engines for ONE sortie at max power indefinitely, until the WEP or nitrous tank ran dry, and NOT significantly "damage" the engine to where it would degrade performance.
(There may have been some engines that couldn't handle "overboost" or "overrev" or whatever, but I haven't seen any accounts of this).

What probably WOULD happen is that the engine would be "thrashed" or "wear out" sooner, i.e. it might fail on a LATER sortie thanks to the abuse YOU gave it earlier.  But that failure might happen at cruise power, not when you went to WEP.

IMO the penalty for disregarding the flight manual engine restrictions was decreased engine life, not imminent failure.  How do you model that?  Can't do it without opening the "random engine failure" can of worms.

Say you normally have a 5% chance of an engine malfunction (as opposed to 0% now).  For any given sortie, you have, say, 10 minutes of WEP, and 10 minutes of military power available (different for each plane).  Every minute you spend at mil/WEP beyond that goes into your "engine life factor" for the NEXT sortie and modifies the 5% malfunction probability upward.  Fly around in mil/WEP for 5 straight sorties, maybe you have a 50% chance of an engine failure on the next one.

Probably pretty complex to program tho...

As for full engine management of prop and mixture controls, what purpose would it serve within the context of the sim?  In RL, you're really talking about the difference between "optimum range" and "optimum power" when you start tweaking the RPM and mixture settings.  In the sim, you're pretty much always looking just for optimum power (which is EASY to set up in a real plane) and you don't have much need for optimum range because of the arena size and availability of drop tanks.  So sure, it's nice from a "realism" standpoint, but is it going to change the way you play the game enough to justify programming it?  I suspect almost everyone will just program a joystick button to "cruise" and another one to "fight" and that'll be all the "tweaking" they need to get the most out of "real" engine controls.

I suppose with a big enough arena, and carefully modified fuel burn settings, you could "force" folks to learn how to use the engine controls properly.  Seems more suited to scenario use tho...

--jedi

[Wanker]

Fuel is currently set at a modifier to simulate what would be "realistic" in real life(tm), so why couldn't engines have that same sort of modifier. So while it's true that a big radial in real life could survive abuse for hours, maybe it would only survive that abuse for minutes in AH time.

[Citabria]

if an engine is run at excesively high temps beyond its limits it will begin to experience detonation (uneven fuel burn. a sort of explosion when fuel ignited by the spark plug) and also the more severe and the more catestrauphic effects of preignition where fuel burns before ignited by the spark plugs. the engine cylinder gets slammed down with jackhammer force as the crankshaft pushes it up causing severe engine damage and most likely engine failure.

both result in loss of power and possible engine failure.

[lazs]

An "engine overheat modifier" for time would mean that any engine hit/damage would also have to be thus modified.   With any kind of "usefull" full power engine overheat modifier this would mean that any engine damage would cause allmost instant failure in AH...  Or do you just want to pick and choose your "modifier" failures?

Course ther is that test where they ran an "overclocked" P47 turbo motor on a static test for some ungawdly number of hrs at more than full power and never did trash it.   Pratt used a full power static test of 3 hrs as standard testing I believe.
lazs