HHS wrote:planetacancun wrote:If water on a storm made the Nimitz go up and down with ocean waves, that would be sooo awesome. The carrier landings would be a real challenge! Anyways my latest video with some more water reflections from the morning sun on KSFO.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrmCFIBymcc
Great video and a nice tutorial for the harrier!
Regarding Nimitz going up and down: I had the same idea, but was stopped by vivian meazza (author Buccaneer, Hunter....) who himself was aboard on a large aircarrier in RL- the Nimitz is so heavy that even large waves doesn't affect much.
But for smaller vessels with helideck it should be possible! The code is laready done and can be find at the small boats at KMTN!
Well, that's not what I've been told by ex-carrier pilots and "rainbow" personnel, but nevermind : swell effect on ships is more affected by volume under water than weight, see Archimedes principle. That's why you can see a supertanker bob up and down on heavy seas (and it weighs several time the weight of the Nimitz. Up to 5 times more heavy with a full load ).
Carriers also bob up and down, and there are several instances of crash on landing , especially at night, with heavy seas because it suddenly went up 30 feet, hitting the plane's underside as it landed.
That's why you start carrier landing training on a painted runway the size of a carrier deck : Field carrier training to mitigate the risks.
Now, a ship the same volume as a carrier but much lighter would of course bob up and down at a much greater oscillation than the carrier, but the carrier still moves up and down, enough that in certain heavy seas, flight ops are impossible.
That such an oscillation is negligible in "normal" (nothing normal about carrier ops
situations, with good weather, and the carrier going 25+ knots, as is the norm (it's totally unrealistic to land on a stopped carrier : carriers actually accelerate for flight ops, incurring a greater risk of detection by sonar) is an acceptable simplification for a sim. But it's not reality.
Saying a carrier doesn't roll with the waves is wrong, and against the law of physics : if it floats, it bobs up and down on the waves, period
I'm surprised Vivian would say such a thing.
That said, I can understand him recommending not doing it as it could implicate technical complications : would the hook and wire code support this (how accurate is the trap code, or is it a hack ? etc.), would landing gears behave appropriately, etc.
But most importantly : a carrier floats, thus experiences buoyancy (c.f Archimedes Principle), thus bobs up and down.
Cheers,
Nic