[F22-Raptor-2006]

opening canopy for the default planes such as spit VIII will need a fm change so that won't be happening.

I was thinking more along the lines of creating new slot versions of the default Spits using adapted versions of the MkVIII anyway, maybe I should have stated this specifically to avoid confusion.

I don't know a great deal about the process of making mods, but I'm curious as to how adding an opening canopy to an aircraft is changing the FM?

The FM is like the config file for your il2 game. Basically in there there is a line which says this "Canopy = 0" if it was 1 then it would open assuming you have the relevant class files to animate the movement of it. There are other things like wing area, breakup speed and stuff like that in the fm.