Hey Typhoon fans, hope everything's going well in RL. We've been pretty quiet in this thread, so I thought I'd post an update of what I've been working on, and what I'm planning, for your much-needed feedback and comments.
Flight Control SystemI'm getting somewhere now, in making as realistic an FCS as possible. Naturally, little is known about how the real aircraft's FCS functions, only what it does, so I'm mostly guessing, but the system I have operating in my experimental Typhoon works pretty well. There's still quite a bit of tweaking and a fair bit of maths (ugh) to do, but I'm pleased with it thus far.
The system is based around a central PID controller which sends commands to the control surfaces whenever the pilot's joystick is in its dead zone (assuming the FCS Override button in the cockpit is not pressed) - the parameters which define the dead zone are configurable, to allow customisation to the pilot's particular joystick or preference. When the joystick enters the deadzone, the current pitch and roll attitudes are maintained by the controller, allowing the pilot to remove his hand from the stick with predictable results. The Autopilot is a subsystem of the FCS, and sends information to the central controller when the relevant modes are selected - in this way, the pilot can override the autopilot with joystick movements along one or both axes. When the axis or axes enter the deadzone, the aircraft will return to automatic flight on the predetermined route. A simple Nasal script cancels the autopilot's vertical and lateral modes, and this can be mapped to a joystick button, so that in an emergency, the pilot can command a change of attitude with the joystick and cancel the AP with a button at their leisure. One interesting side effect is that, because the FCS must be able to operate correctly when the aircraft is inverted, the central controller senses inverted roll attitudes and inverts the aileron commands accordingly - I flew 60 miles with the aircraft inverted in the Terrain Following Radar autopilot mode, watching it follow the terrain inverted at 100 feet was pretty gratifying, even if I cannot think of a single realistic application for this "feature"
Engine Start and StopI think I have a concept for this, and would be interested to hear if anybody else has been musing on the issue. I'm in the process of getting my ideas into a definite plan, which I'll write up later this evening and post here, but I'd love to know if anyone has any good ideas for making this work so we can decide where to go with it.
Cheers all