Wall-dog,

My points about enabling padlocking, or designing in sim playability (or what Dantes calls balance) squares well with what you have written above.

Also, there's good discussions still occuring on forums (like here) concerning what makes a combat flight sim engrossing to play, and it's not always harder-realism as you've noted, but more correctly how well a sim creates a convincing ranking in performance (the relationship) between the subject aircraft, and how well that relationship seems to mesh with known recollections of those who actually flew the combat!

Get that ranking relationship right, and a convincing fascimile of the real thing will follow.

I'd like to make another quick point here before I move onto the main emphasis of this posting, and that is to say there's often little need for cockpit instrumentation in much early aviation flying. In fact early aviators flew more "in tune" with their engines (through sound), than by referencing their flight gauges (if they had any). Now the reason I'm saying this, as most of you already know, is to emphasize that real flying is done mostly through audible and other sensory cues (first), and secondly through the instruments (non IFR flying that is). In fact, if we were to take away all cockpit instrumentation in our favorite sim, and then experience combat actions between different aircraft types and pilots, our impressions would sound much like what you have referred to from Galland's writings and those of other combat pilots............they responded to how well their plane's ranked, when compared to acceleration, zoom advantage, the ability to roll or hold the edge in a turn, etc..............in general terms! As opposed to reading something like "I reached 165 kph in level flight as I eased in behind my target, he saw me and immediately dove to 3200 meters where upon backing 30 degrees I was able to fire a port deflection lead of 10 degrees and he immediately caught fire, and went down."

Again, air combat is all about where the advantages fall, and how well to maximize your's while minimizing the enemy's.........right?

Ok, my friend Stickshaker sent me a collection of his favorite forum discussions here recently (thanks again Hans), and amongst the discussions was a gem written by the designers of GMX's Firepower add-on for CFS3 about accelerated stalls. Well one entry in that thread is approproate to our discussions here I think, so allow me to reprint the text contained in a post from airfileguy through ScottFP:

POST 1:
There's been some discussion about comparisons of the IL-2 aircraft with Firepower aircraft, with respect to stall and spin characteristics. Scott mentioned that, after the Firepower package was wrapped up and ready to go, he found some time to fire up IL-2 and do a little flying. The result of this was that he found the stall/spin behaviors of some of the Firepower fighters to be remarkably similar to the IL-2 fighters.

This was not intentional -- in other words, when the flight models were being developed, we didn't say, "well, lets play IL-2 and then try the Firepower stuff and really get it matched." The way it came about was much more natural and evolutionary, and was based on a lot of different experiences and research. But the result, in our estimation, was quite pleasing.

Scott and I are both pilots in real life, as well as being avid flight simulator fans. We think we have some understanding of the difference between flying a real aircraft and flying a computer. As one friend of mine put it, who's an aerobatic pilot and aeronautical engineer, the biggest difference is that "you can't hit the pause button." Obviously there is much more to it than that. Scott and I had many discussions about this, and, aside from the fact you can't hit the pause button, we came up with a few observations about the difference between computer flight simulators and real airplane.

The biggest difference is the "seat of the pants" feel you get from a real plane. In VFR flight, at any rate, you really do rely on the sensations of motion and pressure you get from your butt, along with the visual references from the outside. That's the second biggest difference. No matter how hard we try, we can only get a small slice of the outside world to appear in our cockpit view at any given time. There is just very little outside reference, which makes PC flight simulators much harder to fly than real aircraft. It's pretty much like flying on instruments all the time, at least with respect to maintaining level, coordinated flight. That's why takeoffs and landing are so tough in the simulator; you can't see much, which is why the games always give you a HUD view without the panel, which really helps.

What we wanted to do was to provide the most analogous experience possible. One way this was accomplished was through the g-view which is describe in another thread. The second way was the method we used to model stalls and spins. There has been and always will be a lot of talk about "realism." Just what is "realism," anyway? We decided it was a simulated experience that would leave the person feeling as though they had really "been there, done that." The problem is this is different for every individual. And most computer gamers have never flown a real aircraft and probably never will. They just want to have a great, immersive experience playing the game. But, at the same time, there are quite a few folks that like to at least believe that some effort has been made to get the game as "close to reality" as possible, or as Microsoft puts it, "as real as it gets."

That's where the slow flight, stall, and spin behavior really come into play. I'll follow up on this discussion a little later with another post, explaining just how we went about putting together our version of "as real as it gets."

I think this posting jives very well with the conversations we've been having here, especially this line:

There is just very little outside reference, which makes PC flight simulators much harder to fly than real aircraft. It's pretty much like flying on instruments all the time, at least with respect to maintaining level, coordinated flight.

..........much harder to fly than real aircraft!!!

See, flight sims don't always get it better by doing it harder, they get it better by getting the relationships between the aircraft types right, and so if the relationships in performance ranking between types feels right, then so will the simulated combat too! First though, we've got to be able to fly these simulated aircraft with some degree of control and SA, and if it takes a little mechanism here that let's our eyes track an enemy aircraft, or an arrow there that shows his relative direction, or some recognizable swooshing sound to let us know we're approaching the stall...........

.........well these things should be in there, afterall, it's the general combat feel that's got to be there first, or everything will just fall flat with a big thud...........game over man!