Hi all,
Let me start by saying this is an amazing piece of work and I adore flying it!
It does really remind me of my first training flights were everything was new and I needed to force myself not to tense up on the controls!
I planted it in the ground the first three times I flew it within a few seconds as I was overcontrolling like mad. That was resolved as I did away with the built in controller setup and switched to FSUIPC. I have been using it for years and am a lot more comfortable with it.
As I have custom heli-controls with hall effect sensors I calibrated the full range of movement as well as set the DELTA for each axis to 1 (default 256). If you leave the default the sim is going to ignore inputs less than 256, which isn’t very conducive to control pressure movements. Once that was all sorted I can lift and hold a nice hover without any dramas and cruise is so reminiscent of my early flying I’d almost forget I was simming.
An instructor of mine once told me “think of it like you are stirring a cup of tea. Not mixing cement!” That stuck with me and on completion of that early flight he wrote in my feedback “…successfully hovering at Fielding without posing a risk to the sheep!” They were a New Zealand solution to mowing the grass of the airfield and worked pretty well).
Issues I’m still having:
I would like to always start cold and dark. Its half and half at the moment with no real sense of why it sometimes starts running.
The transponder is INOP on occasion. Is this programmed?
The Mags can only be manipulated to BOTH once (if OFF) and then don’t respond to any additional presses(If BOTH already they are fixed), likewise the radio and transponder. So I can’t do a Mag check, or shut down properly.
I assume its not modelled but I would like to do the Clutch engagement check (ENG at 1500 Rotor at 100- close throttle to marry the needles and then bring them up together). Any chance we could get this in the future?
Legibility of the Carb Air/Filter air Temp, engine instruments and fuel gauge. I use this in a three projector, curved screen setup so its naturally a little darker than LCDs. Will there be anyway to increase the contrast on these instruments?
I have a 47G manual that has the same engine as the G2. Can you clarify the ranges of the arcs and redlines being used for this model on the respective gauges as the reference I have is way off on the manifold pressure range. Could you include a Manifold Pressure table?
Nit picking, the Yellow arc for ground resonance, shouldn’t it be on the inner Rotor scale?
I anticipate I’ll be spending lots of time in this little machine so I am planning to make a separate hardware panel for this chopper with my usual hardware gauges and I’ll be modelling the Mixture/Carb heat Quadrant as well as a more appropriate 1940s style Magneto switch. I will probably make a simple radio and transponder as well. I actually like the Icom that’s included so I may just go straight to modelling that one and use mobiflight to connect a small LCD, switches and rotary encoders.
Just so everyone is clear I haven’t started work on any of it yet (other than bouncing ideas around my head), but once it’s done I’d like to release it to the community so anyone with basic tools and access to a 3D printer can make their own. If anyone would be interested in building one for themselves let me know so I can gauge how far down the rabbit hole to go!
I do plan cheating and adding an optional bolt on panel for an artificial horizon, Large VSI (probably a 2000 or 4000 fpm as I like seeing the finer movements), and a Directional Gyro as the compass isn’t clear enough in my setup. I will also be making a Large Cylinder head Temp gauge which will be in the slot filled by the VSI currently on the default panel.
So that brings on another wish list request which is can we have an option to hide the flight controls and the main instrument panel? I want to keep the bubble, skids and rotor disk.
For anyone out there that has access to a 47 or has photos stashed away would anyone be able to share closeups of the gauge faces? and rough measurements of the basic panel? I have gathered up a pile of photos from airliners.net, jetphotos.net and a few other locations. I can approximate the panel measurements so that’s no drama either way but the gauge faces would be a huge help.
Cheers and happy flying!
Stuart