Must be the "Titanium" in the AI planes

There is a reasonable way to achieve altitude drop for fragile planes. I have found that nose down 15 degrees with flat spins (heavy rudder) and throttle all the way back, allows me to lose altitude fast without undue stress on the craft in WOFF. Of course the AI do not do this, but what ever works, works for me.

I do that too.
My AI squad mates can go darn near vertical straight down with no damage. When that happens I stay above the fight and see how it develops. Sometimes this saves my butt too, because I have time to change tactics as the DF changes.

I have so far only tested german Planes, but except the Dr1, you can do reeeeally freaky Things none of us would ever dare in RL with them. If you ever want to get rid of a Pursuer, dive into a tight, full downward Looping. The Plane will squeak and screak - and without Engine runnig it will almost certainly stall - but the AI never follows you into that... and it's better catching the Plane from a Stall, than catching Bullets - or enemy Planes like Olham described. Don't be shy on the Stick: If the Screen turns almost completely red, you are doing it right ;-)
NEVER do Things like that in a Dr1. If you torture this Plane, it instantly turns into a Doubledecker...

Although I'm late here I'm going back to the subject of this thread and, respectfully, I agree with Jim Attrill.

Rolling into a fence can be a bad thing for an airplane and pilot, yes. And I think that fences causing damage and harm to the WOFF pilot is a great idea! But when you roll a ca. 2,000 lb total weight airplane (Alb, for instance) engine-first into a flimsy-looking wooden fence and there is 1. no damage to the fence and 2. no damage to the airplane yet 3. your pilot dies, frankly that's just too much. It's akin to the way-olden days of OFF when an airplane exploded if it dragged a wingtip. I have many photos of WW1 airplane wrecks that pilots survived despite the airplane winding up in shreds or pieces--damage WAY worse than when I roll into a fence and die in WOFF. Rolling into a fence is always fatal for me. I always try to land on roads, too, but one cannot determine where one's engine gives out and a road is not always an option. So sooner or later one must contend with fences, and their lethality exceeds realism.

I understand it's not a "bug" and is a Dev decision. Just voicing my two cents (okay, one-and-a-half cents. ) that perhaps the damage/injury can be scaleable dependent upon the speed that one rolls into a fence. Meanwhile, or regardless, I'll keep looking for roads!

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I go back and forth on this issue. Really on the fence about it.

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Well, Pol recently said something like "the fence stands for all sorts of deadly things
that can happen, when you land way off your airfield, in any open terrain.
Holes, stones etc."
So since I take them as that - as substitutes for all sorts of dangers lurking in an
unexplored field, I can live with their lethality.
After all, these fences are much better visible than any fox or rabbit holes.
This is not a sim for simulating the physics of any ground objects or rolling aircraft
correctly, so I don't expect that.

Rolling into a fence or a hole or a stone should not be automatically fatal. Especially at walking speed while rolling out. If so, a friend of mine would be dead.

Guess I'm going to have to start posting photos of serious wrecks that were not fatal, then compare them with screenshots of my plane after rolling into a fence-that-stands-for-all-sorts-of-deadly-things that killed my pilot and did not damage my plane. On the other hand, why bother? The sim is unrealistic in a lot of other areas, too, but is still good/fun overall.

I would say just use Robert's backup program and make a judgement call on if you want to revive that pilot.

I like the danger they impose but if it was more speed dependent I would think thats best.

Well,

My pilot, Alan Troop in 56, hit a so called "titanium" fence yesterday and survived. The SE was a bit bent but
the pilot was OK after a few days in hospital.

I don't really have a prob with them a such. But I would wish they were more visible and so avoidable.

As soon as Lt Throop saw the fence he stuffed everything in the opposite corner, dragged a wing and hit the
fence kind of obliquely - any landing... (thanks to Olham for that tip).

By the way, that's 2 jobs Mr Throop has (not) completed and both have been cut short by engine failure, CO not
a happy man.

All the best.

RS

I agree. If I hit a fence while sprinting at 15 mph an hour, or stepped on a stone while sprinting, or stepped into a rabbit hole while sprinting, none of these things would kill me. Neither should they kill my virtual pilot in a 2000 lb airplane hitting a fence at 5 mph. Scaleable damage would be much more realistic--hit a fence right after touchdown could cause some problems. But dying because your plane, with a dead engine, rolled into a fence at less than walking speed is just too much.

OK time to post this again;

The subject has been flogged to death. Hitting fences in an aircraft made of canvas is a very bad thing
http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/3974781

We also said it represents all the zillions of other ways you could die landing in a rough field.
Pot holes, divots, trenches, junk, whatever. If I remember Cecil Lewis describes one where a friend hit a pot hole flipped and died.

We could remove the fences then you can land anywhere any-time and never worry and live long.

A friend of mine fell forwards but landed on his leg, felt a sharp pain in his leg, and died.
True.

Turn on invincible in workshops then you can decide when you die.


It was tested lots before release, but some tests we just did this morning rather than working on Addons! :

WM
1) Rolled slowly into a fence in an Albatros - slowly into a fence survived at approx 10mph. 100% health.
2) Same again approx 60mph = 0% health, dead.

Pol: I just did a few tests in an Avitaik:
1) Rolled into a fence, (with a broken wing already from previous collision), at 29mph -after hitting fence health =100%
2) Rolled into a fence at 38mph, fence broke my tail, health=100% still.
3) Took off came to touch wheels before fence, rolled hit it at 59mph, health=0 dead.

Will post some pictures shortly if required.

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We had an incident a few years back at the airport up the road from my house. A fellow was taking off in his ultralight when the engine conked. He did not try to turn back around, (the correct thing to do), and instead settled his kite down into the marsh at the end of the runway. The undercarriage caught in the rushes and the plane flipped over into the water at a very slow speed. Bad luck was his though as he was knocked unconscious going over and hung upside-down in his harness in the water and drowned before he was pulled out of the plane. The plane was undamaged and only needed to be dried out yet he was dead.

Landings can kill you even when they shouldn't.

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Hi Guys,

I guess some inside info of the mechanisms at work here are required.

CFS3 physics had one level of hardness and if you hit anything you kinda died (In fact you just exploded) or nothing happend at all.

Now we have introduced 3 levels of object hardness - soft, medium and hard and also now the velocity of the collision is also taken into account with the mass of the craft and the craft contact points (which part of plane hits the object) are also taken into account.

So now in P4 it is possible to survive hitting objects even with something as fragile as a WW1 craft.

The tests that Pol and I have just taken the time to do indicate that the system is working just as it should and as it did when we designed and implemented it more than 12 months ago.

Its not perfect as the physical properties of the object being hit is in one of three categories. This does limit what is achievable on a micro level but overall the balance is damn good and way better than CFS3/P3.

The above results that Pol posted details on are proof in point.
However why not do some tests of your own?

Remember if you hit a fence and your craft has already suffered damage, taken bullets, etc or you have been injured in combat the results get worse of course - meaning that you are more likely to die.

WM

Hi Mark, you haven't posted for a while so it's nice to know you are still around

I think the problem with the fences is that they are hard to see until you hit them. And they don't LOOK very dangerous at all.

It rather reminds me of about the last job I did on an aeroplane which was to blend out the damage on a propellor on a Cessna 310? where the farmer had taxied it into a barbed-wire fence. I did it but told them all that as it was illegal I would not sign for it. Officially no blending is allowed on the inner third of the prop. Being South African civilians they didn't know that. The props were brand new so the owner was a bit p1ssed off with having to throw it away. And so I fixed the prop - took nearly a week to do it properly. The damage was not visible - it was all done by hand.

I did all the propellor work for NAC at Rand airport because the other 'fitters' were scared of them. As an RAF apprenticed technician I was not worried at all.

So I will keep on avoiding the fences of any sort

If I have a vote...
I vote that you two go back to work on add-ons

Pol, "we did this rather than work on add-ons." Come on, man! That's a passive-aggressive comment stereotypical of a mother trying to guilt her kids.

Respectfully, rolling into a fence or a pothole in a WW1 was NOT lethal to anyone an overwhelming majority of times. Colliding with a fence was a “very bad thing” as regards to damaging the plane, yes, but it was NOT automatically lethal or even injurious to the pilot. Neither with "canvas" airplanes, which had stout frames made of screwed/glued wood or welded metal, nor the many types skinned with wood. For instance, look at the photo below of a DH.5 airframe. Inasmuch as collisions with ground objects, the pilot is very well protected by an enclosing frame, metal cowl and engine. I’m not saying they were like P-47 Thunderbolts, and I’m not saying the following applies to people here, but I do believe that tissue and balsa wood models have given many people the impression that WW1 airplanes were much flimsier and more fragile than they actually were.




Sure, there can be freak accidents way beyond the norm, such as with your friend, Pol. Or I guy I knew who fell off the back of a parked truck, hit his head on the curb, was knocked out, then flatlined/life-support/family said goodbye/pulled the plug/dead. On the other hand, I had a car t-bone me riding my bicycle (I was going 20, he was going 40) through an intersection and all I wound up with was a destroyed bicycle, bruised elbow, and good case of road rash. No helmet or protective clothing, and I literally walked home (had to, the bike looked like a pretzel!). In 2002 I had a co-worker lose her engine on takeoff and set the plane down right off the end of the runway and, ironically, it rolled into a wooden fence (this was a Cessna 172RG) at the airport boundary and nothing happened to the fence, the plane, her, or her student. Even more irony, the fence resembled those I’ve seen in WOFF. Here, just grabbed a shot of it from Google Earth (the airport is Clow International, in Bolingbrook, Illinois):



As far as Lou’s example of an ultra-light, you hit any kind of water or marsh with gear down and the plane usually goes ass-over-tea kettle (very famous example is the Zero that crashed while landing in the Aleutians, which the US subsequently captured). Especially if a guy is in a rush to get down. That situation isn’t automatically fatal, either, but certainly more problematic than hitting a fence. But neither I nor people we’ve known have anything to do with WW1 and what happened to aviators when their planes hit a fence. Or a hole. Or whatever. What happened to them? Usually, roughed up a bit, that’s it. As Cecil Lewis also wrote of his crashing a Bristol Scout while landing crosswind, “There was a big bounce, then another, the undercarriage vee-struts collapsed and over she went on her back. I scrambled out, unhurt…”


BUT! I’m glad you guys did take time from working on add-ons to test “fence lethality.” I’ve never wanted the fences removed. I've said they are a good idea. A great idea! I’d also like to see power lines and telephone wires in flight sims someday, too! I just opined the damage should be scaleable. And based on your recent test results, it seems to be. My personal experiences in WOFF have been contradictory to those tests, but I concede that perhaps I’ve just been extremely unlucky. So if fences are meant to represent all the possible dangers one may encounter during an off-field landing, and you have to draw the line somewhere with how to represent that, and this is where you’ve drawn it, so be it. It’s just a game for fun, after all. I’ll just regard fences as another challenge to overcome.

EDIT: Jeez, all that and I just saw WM's post (added while I typed the above) about the "three levels of object hardness." Seems it's largely a matter of code limitation rather than Dev decision/implementation. The three levels are WAY better than the old single explosive level, no doubt! I'd much rather have these three levels than exploding if you touched anything, so I'll shut up now.

Pol, Winding Man

There is so little wrong with this sim that you have to leave us at least one thing we can razz you about! Please don't take it as a serious slight, humans are complainers by nature, we just need some little thing to cling to!



Oh, no hurry up and finish those Zeps and Gothas!

Its not a code limitation at all but rather a concious decision to represent three levels of hardness rather than have to calculate expected hardness values of each and every object in the theater - call it a time concious decision.

And given the test results that we took on the three categories the results speak for themselves - its more than adequate for purposes at the given time.

Once more: fences do not kill you if you collide below a certain velocity and you have a good craft and good health at time of collision.

Any way all this talk about probablilities etc is certainly beyond the scope of what we are trying to achieve in a flight sim with a limited FOV and resolution (monitor - I cant see the fences??) and some sort of sense of speed ( I was travelling slowly - were you??) - but I guess you could look at what happens to your car when you hit 'things' at moderate velocities and as the velocity increases the damage sustained scales quite quickly - 60MPH is not slow.

I think this has been flogged to death and there are no titanium fences in the sim.

WM