Johan G wrote in Fri Jun 06, 2014 2:36 pm:StuartC wrote in Thu Jun 05, 2014 10:46 pm:Because this will happen, soon.......
It is a good start, but I think that it disintegrates a bit much.
I've only just had time to properly digest your helpful notes, which on the whole I agree with and I think Tomaskom, our aerodynamicist whose work the disintegration effect is, will find it helpful to tune the scenarios. My impression is that, as you say, it's a start - Tom produced it remarkably quickly, but he has some exciting stuff going on in his professional life at the moment and it will improve when he has more time. I don't know how collisions are detected - the code has not yet been released, it's part of the L-159 development - but I would imagine it will support, for example, the loss of a single wing, a broken gear unit etc.
My view on the realism is that the progressive nature of problems or damage is of principal importance. The damage script you've seen in action on the Victor engine works, as I've said in another post, on the principal of failure probabilities. Damage zones are Nasal objects, each of which has a failure probability which increases according to damage to itself or nearby zones. A problem like low oil pressure on an engine should not be dangerous if the engine is shut down correctly and in good time; a problem like the loss of a flight surface at altitude is likely to induce flight conditions in which other zones will fail - e.g. a wing comes off, the aircraft plummets and spins, the airframe is overstressed and fails in various places at different times. If Tom and I can integrate our work successfully, you should get an inherently more realistic disintegration which hopefully will also affect the FDM.
StuartC wrote in Fri Jun 06, 2014 2:15 pm:How about a bird strike knocking out one or more engines ?
Ooh, nice.
Brings this to mind: "Hit birds. We've lost thrust on both engines. We're turning back towards LaGuardia." Time flies, it's already five years ago.
Yeah, I recently re-read the stories as part of my birdstrike - can't believe it's that long ago!
I realized that a bird strike script could sample the terrain land class and increase the possibility for a bird strike in certain conditions, like where water and land meets, along beaches and over wetlands, as well as increase the possibility at lower altitudes. Something for the future I guess.
Yes indeed. I believe bird activity close to airports can also constitute part of a METAR report. At the moment, the birdstrike function is a very basic way of getting a visual representation of the strike (based on the famous footage of, I think, an F-16 student pilot losing an engine to birdstrike) and applying some damage - it's tied to the aircraft model, not free roaming, and in this form, would be part of a random failures system in the aircraft (as previously mentioned, this uses FG's current built-in failures system and will continue to do so when galvedro's improved code shows up in V3.2). I am, however, also quite interested in Hooray's AI-controlled birdstrike script - with Nasal support in AI scenarios, a "Random Hazards" scenario could determine likely bird locations and spawn a flock of them. A collision with the flock would result in some calculations as to the likely number of birds ingested and call the hit function of appropriate damage zones (engines mostly, but potentially other places... windscreen even?! (But then we have to model decompression also, which I quite fancy doing!)
UPDATE: I've written something for the newsletter now about this, with three videos embedded. If you're interested in Tom's fireball, now being implemented by Stuart on some of his development aircraft, this video shows its original application, as the explosion resulting from a V-1 impact. As you can see, there's little frame-rate loss from such a big explosion and resulting smoke column, even with another fire burning and many MP aircraft close by.