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#3094719 - 09/16/10 06:04 AM Nieuport instruments why so few?  
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polisheagle1939 Offline
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Does anyone know why the real Nieuports had so few cockpit instruments compared to other planes? Thanks in advance for any replies.


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#3094848 - 09/16/10 01:38 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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No real reason, they wanted to keep it simple and as less weight as possible.


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#3094855 - 09/16/10 01:50 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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They expected the pilot to use the clear glass panel.

And occasionally lean left and right to look around it.

smile


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#3094895 - 09/16/10 02:45 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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It might be that precision instrumentation was expensive and a new pilot/plane might not last that long in combat so why waste them? Pilots who became more experienced, got kills, survived, got to customise their own mounts I would imagine, just a guess, who knows for sure.


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#3095008 - 09/16/10 05:18 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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But the SPAD and British and Germans have some pretty extensive cockpit lay outs compared to the Nieuports. Was Nieuport trying to concentrate on production?, was there shortages of instruments to Nieuport? was it a weight problem with Nieuports and not so much with others? Nieuports attitude toward what a pilot should have?


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#3095428 - 09/17/10 04:14 AM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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Hi,

The Devs installed only those instruments which they were sure of - you get factory fresh aircraft without any "field mods". Another thing might be the lack of evidence and primary sources about instrument location and type in some of the aircrafts. It may be somehow strange that for example, the late war plane - the Pfalz D.XII has only rpm, air pressure and fuel gauges - with no compass and alimeter...

#3095861 - 09/17/10 06:52 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: Lukasz]  
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Originally Posted By: Lukasz
Hi,

The Devs installed only those instruments which they were sure of - you get factory fresh aircraft without any "field mods". Another thing might be the lack of evidence and primary sources about instrument location and type in some of the aircrafts. It may be somehow strange that for example, the late war plane - the Pfalz D.XII has only rpm, air pressure and fuel gauges - with no compass and alimeter...


That makes the most sense so far. I'm sure documentation for some of the instrument panels and actual " at the front" cockpit layouts is scarce.


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#3097522 - 09/20/10 01:26 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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I've seen period diagrams that also showed few instruments however...


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#3097933 - 09/20/10 11:08 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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The Nieuport 28 has got to be the most miserable excuse for a fighter that I've ever seen. The worst forward visibility of any aircraft in the game (even worse than the SPAD XIII!), and no instruments. No yaw indicator, no altimeter, no engine thermometer, no airspeed indicator, no nothing! Ugh! And the ship doesn't even have good speed or great maneuverability to make up for this.

#3097957 - 09/20/10 11:56 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: Josh Echo]  
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Originally Posted By: Josh Echo
The Nieuport 28 has got to be the most miserable excuse for a fighter that I've ever seen. The worst forward visibility of any aircraft in the game (even worse than the SPAD XIII!), and no instruments. No yaw indicator, no altimeter, no engine thermometer, no airspeed indicator, no nothing! Ugh! And the ship doesn't even have good speed or great maneuverability to make up for this.


It's air-cooled; I don't think any of the rotaries have a temp gauge because none of them have engine coolant that can boil off. As for airspeed - slipstream noise is almost as good as an IAS dial.

What's more, I'm damn glad that Neoqb/777 haven't taken a look in the cockpit and gone "Oh, since it's got so few instruments let's up the horsepower and increase aileron size to compensate!", and glad they didn't do the opposite, too. :p

#3098104 - 09/21/10 04:31 AM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: Masaq]  
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Originally Posted By: Masaq
What's more, I'm damn glad that Neoqb/777 haven't taken a look in the cockpit and gone "Oh, since it's got so few instruments let's up the horsepower and increase aileron size to compensate!"


Uh, yeah, me too. That wasn't at all what I was suggesting. I was just saying, if the Nieuport 28 happened to be an excellent fighter in other regards, I could better forgive it for having no instruments. As it is, it doesn't have any saving graces. I wonder how frequently other gauges were added in by the ground crews; if they weren't, I'd call that a suicide ship.

#3098125 - 09/21/10 05:17 AM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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Quote:
I'd call that a suicide ship.


Why?

Let's think about how these planes were flown:

A) VFR below 10,000 feet.
B) In a tight geographic area where navigation by landmarks was stressed.
C) Effective range of about 200 miles.

Tachometer? Either it's running flat out or it's off, thanks to a blip switch. Historically the top wing would shred before the engine over-revved.
Airspeed indicator? You've got sound of wind through wires, and pilots knew not to dive too aggressively.
Compass? Addressed.
Slip indicator? That one stumps me, too. I guess they figured the pilot could feel the wind on one cheek and know he was slipping.

Let's also remember that the real pilots in WWI didn't fly like we do in the virtual world. They flew a helluvalot more conservatively than we do. Likewise, remember that it wasn't unusual for a guy with ten or twelve hours of total flight time to be assigned to combat duty. They didn't do the aerobatics that we pull off.

Statistically the average life expectancy of a Scout Pilot on the Western Front was 13 flight hours. Not combat hours, flight hours. Every WWI Scout was a "suicide ship."


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#3098227 - 09/21/10 12:49 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: Dart]  
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Originally Posted By: Dart
Airspeed indicator? You've got sound of wind through wires, and pilots knew not to dive too aggressively.
Slip indicator? That one stumps me, too. I guess they figured the pilot could feel the wind on one cheek and know he was slipping.


Wind through wires can't tell you how close you are to your best climbing speed. Without an airspeed indicator, there's no way to fly your aeroplane with maximum efficiency. Same (and even more true) without a slip-and-skid indicator. By the time you're feeling wind on one cheek, you're yawing crazily. You can't feel (or see) a "slightly" off-center yaw, which is still enough to significantly decrease your acceleration, maximum speed, climb rate, and turning rate, as well as increase the spin tendency in a stall and make the bullets not quite go where the sights are pointing. Not good.

#3098248 - 09/21/10 01:19 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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Horses didn't have instruments...why should planes smile
You can't look at the instruments whilst fighting - you have to be able to fly the plane by feel.
Having recently flown a Tiger Moth...
You can feel the speed, slip and yaw
You can hear the engine (and how!)
You can feel the stall coming (In truth I didn't do this smile
You may not get the best out of it but that's the way it was.
The compass is pretty much worthless unless you are Francis Chichester flying the Tasman Sea - if you cant see where you are going you are lost anyway...
The Tiger has a secondary mechanical ASI on a wing strut that bends with the airspeed, more useful than something in the cockpit you cant spare a second to look at. Gliders have a bit of string in front of the screen as a rudimentary slip indicator, didn't WWI lanes have the same?
Cheers,
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#3098278 - 09/21/10 02:01 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: Josh Echo]  
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Originally Posted By: Josh Echo
Originally Posted By: Dart
Airspeed indicator? You've got sound of wind through wires, and pilots knew not to dive too aggressively.
Slip indicator? That one stumps me, too. I guess they figured the pilot could feel the wind on one cheek and know he was slipping.


Wind through wires can't tell you how close you are to your best climbing speed. Without an airspeed indicator, there's no way to fly your aeroplane with maximum efficiency. Same (and even more true) without a slip-and-skid indicator. By the time you're feeling wind on one cheek, you're yawing crazily. You can't feel (or see) a "slightly" off-center yaw, which is still enough to significantly decrease your acceleration, maximum speed, climb rate, and turning rate, as well as increase the spin tendency in a stall and make the bullets not quite go where the sights are pointing. Not good.


I guarantee that those scout pilots had a very precise idea of both the speed they went at, and any yaw as well. Glider pilots do too.


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#3098282 - 09/21/10 02:02 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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Quote:
Without an airspeed indicator, there's no way to fly your aeroplane with maximum efficiency.


And this gets to the heart of it.

In WWI they didn't really care about maximum efficiency. Think about it - the bulk of pilots had between ten and twenty hours of total flight experience before getting into the plane. They're worried about landing properly and you're pushing best rates of climb on them.

Besides, it's not like they had a bunch of charts telling them best climb speed. Even if they did it would vary widely from plane to plane owing to engine state, wire rigging, and variance in construction and covering.

I'll agree that a hasty slip indicator would be the first thing I'd install. But a little slip isn't a bad thing most of the time. Flying nice and straight is a bad thing.

"Stop flying the gauges and concentrate more on flying the airplane."


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#3098334 - 09/21/10 03:10 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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I would agree with Dart, plus some of the instruments available would have been crude by todays standards, a bit of cloth on the struts might have been as useful. As for info many years ago my father had a collection of a monthly magazine the Smithsonian published called "Cross and Cockade". A wealth of period photos and documentation which unfortunately he no longer has, too bad really because they would have been very useful for reference material.


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#3098384 - 09/21/10 04:57 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: Keithb77]  
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Originally Posted By: Keithb77
You can't look at the instruments whilst fighting - you have to be able to fly the plane by feel.


I respectfully disagree. If the aircraft has conveniently placed instruments, I can and do keep track of them during a fight. It greatly increases my combat effectiveness. For instance, in my Spad, even when I'm in a tight turning fight, I fly more or less coordinated. The slip indicator is the only one of the SPAD XIII's instruments which I can usually check while in frantic combat, but that alone helps a lot. Flying coordinated means I turn better, climb better, accelerate better, et cetera.

Other aircraft have better placement of instruments; the P-38 allows me to effectively keep track of my speed, slip and skid, R.P.M., and altitude—even in a close swirling dogfight—while still keeping track of the enemy. That very much improves my ability to outfly the enemy. I can't tell you how many Me-109s I've shot down in my P-38 because I maintained a spiral climb at approximately my best climb speed, while they tried to pull a tighter spiral climb to get inside of me. Or because they were turning with a significant slip and I was turning coordinated.

Originally Posted By: Keithb77
You can feel the speed, slip and yaw


Like I said, you can't feel the yaw if it's only a little bit, but even a little slip or skid which you can't feel still has a significant negative impact on your flight.

Originally Posted By: Keithb77
The compass is pretty much worthless unless you are Francis Chichester flying the Tasman Sea - if you cant see where you are going you are lost anyway...


Often after an intense dogfight, I am disoriented. In the fight I'm too busy keeping track of the aircraft to navigate. In these cases, finding myself in unfamiliar territory with no sense of what direction I'm headed in, my compass is vital. There are seldom landmarks which are clearly recognizable when you don't already know which direction you are facing.

#3098427 - 09/21/10 05:45 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: polisheagle1939]  
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Instrument layout in the p-38 was better because aircraft manufacturers had had an extra twenty years to receive feedback from pilots as to what was a good layout for instruments. In RoF we're still less than a decade from the first heavier-than-air powered flight. Cars built decades after the first steam-driven automobiles still had a tiller rather than a steering wheel... it's not surprising that instrument layouts in early fighters were sketchy and positioned poorly. Surely you don't *really* expect the planes in RoF to be as refined and as well-designed as those twenty years later?! By the time the P-38 was flying, aircraft had been developed for three times longer than they had when the N28 was in use.

As for disorientation - the principles of map and compass navigation are pretty simple. Unless you're over no-man's land there are tons of landmarks! You don't need to navigate from towers, towns and airfields etc - get used to using the shape of forests, rivers, roads and lakes.

So long as you know roughly where you are when you start the fight, and therefore roughly where you are on the map - if your fight has taken ten minutes you will have travelled a maximum of 17 miles or so, if you were fighting in a completely straight line at 100mph... which you almost certainly weren't. More likely you've drifted a maximum of 5 miles or so from your starting point - check your map to see what the easily identifiable shapes are, then look around you to see where they are.

#3098554 - 09/21/10 08:44 PM Re: Nieuport instruments why so few? [Re: Masaq]  
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Originally Posted By: Masaq
the principles of map and compass navigation are pretty simple. Unless you're over no-man's land there are tons of landmarks! You don't need to navigate from towers, towns and airfields etc - get used to using the shape of forests, rivers, roads and lakes.
check your map to see what the easily identifiable shapes are, then look around you to see where they are.


I've been doing map-and-compass-only navigation in games and simulators for at least ten years. Red Baron 3D, the IL-2 Sturmovik series, Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault, Lock On: Modern Air Combat, Aces High II, and now Rise of Flight. The only one that has given me any serious trouble is Rise of Flight. I'm not sure why. Sometimes I know almost exactly where I am, but still can't match the forest shapes with the map. I wonder if it has anything to do with me running on low graphics.

It's easier, of course, if I can point my aircraft north so that the shapes of the forests are aligned with the map. But even then, sometimes I have great difficulty matching them up (again, even when I have a very good idea of where I am). And in aircraft without compasses ... yikes.

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