[ACE-OF-ACES]

Some of the BlitzPigs and our Friends were testing 5.0 in Expert Mode last night on a test center I have set up on the Crimea.

Generally we liked what we experienced. I do have some questions and/or observations.

The aircraft seem to have more "weight", in that you don't feel like you are piloting a balsa wood model in a gale. I suspect some will say it's a return of the "planes on rails" FMs of times past, but that would be a misconception IMHO.
None of the aircraft we flew, and we tried a lot of them, felt like they were balanced on the head of a pin. Never did you have the situation where a control input precipitated a "car skidding on ice" moment.

Still, the difficult planes to fly were still difficult, and the easy planes were still easy. The big engine/high horsepower aircraft required very close attention to trim changes with power set, as they should. The "turn fighters" were still kings of their flight regime, and the "energy fighters" were still the master of theirs. The bombers felt like big, heavy planes that you would not be tempted to try ACM with, well too much anyway.

That is the general consensus that I have been hearing from all who have tried HSFX 5.0

That the planes now 'FEEL' like most people expected them to 'FEEL' based of what they have read from actual pilots who flew the planes

With that said there are two sides to the flight simulation coin

The accuracy of the performance values (static)
The accuracy of the way the plane handles (dynamic)

Where:

• Static (hard numbers)
  Dynamic (how it feels in flight)

The static side refers to the values you will typically find in a real world test report, things like top speed per altitude and rate of climb per altitude.

The dynamic side refers to flying qualities that are hard to, but not impossible to measure.

That is to say you will be hard pressed to find real world data on how the plane shakes or the stick feels in that those are qualities that the test pilot typically made note of but the test engineers didn’t feel it was necessary to actually measure. Test pilot comments like 'the plane shutters before stall' or 'the control stick felt like it was in a bucket of cement'. As noted the test engineers could have set up a test to measure the 'vibration' or 'stick forces' but they didn’t feel it
was important enough to make such tests part of the standard testing. Only in cases where the where it was causing problems did the test engineers and pilots go that extra mile to test and thus measure such things.

HSFX is different from other mods and mod packs in that the HSFX team has an actual aerospace engineer (Aaken) with a Ph.D. doing their flight model (FM), which is why the new EXPERT MODE flight models are so good. Not since the days of Oleg himself has someone with his background and education done flight models for IL-2

Also know that Aaken used very conservative performance data (static) for the US planes, most of which came from Americas Hundred Thousand, Thus you may see a little less speed and ROC for some planes, that you can see in IL-2 Compare for HSFX.

IL-2CompHSFX.zip

The following is the read me is provided here separately but is also included as part of the download.

IL-2CompHSFX_Read_Me.pdf

But Aaken's real focus was on making the planes 'FEEL' right. He spent a long time looking at the limitations of the IL-2 6DOF flight model and made changes to the FM (FMD files) to account for the limitations to improve the over all 'FEEL' and 'PERFORMANCE'. In the initial HSFX 5.0 release his focus was on the 'key' ETO planes, his next update will focus on the PTO planes.