3. Aeroplane Heaven He111 ground steering

Aeroplane Heaven He111 ground steering

  • K

    I've just installed the He111 in P3Dv4. I find it's impossible to taxi because the tailwheel doesn't castor when using differential braking or power. I've tried unlocking the tailwheel using shift+G but this has no effect in the sim. If I unlock the hydraulic system very wide turns are possible but the tailwheel still doesn't castor. Has anyone found the solution to this?

    Kevin

    0
  • K

    Seems no one else has noticed this! Anyway, I've found a solution in case anyone else is interested. The tailwheel has zero steering angle in the aircraft.cfg file which explains why it can't turn. The answer is to open aircraft.cfg in a text editor and search for text "point.0"

    This line defines the tailwheel characteristics.

    point.0= 1, -35.394, 0.000, -4.130, 1600, 0, 0.900, 0.000, 0.600, 0.840, 0.800, 8.000, 3.000, 0, 134.7, 165.1 //Tail wheel

    Edit this as below (change in bold), changing 0.000 to 60.000.

    point.0= 1, -35.394, 0.000, -4.130, 1600, 0, 0.900, 60.000, 0.600, 0.840, 0.800, 8.000, 3.000, 0, 134.7, 165.1 //Tail wheel

    This allows the wheel to deflect up to 60 deg in either direction in response to differential brakes, etc and permits the aircraft to turn.

    Kevin

    0
  • D

    I'm fairly certain that '0' or '180' used to give a free-castoring wheel in earlier versions of FS, but it's definitely 180 which needs to be used now. That is what I believe it was intended to be, so I would suggest for realism changing it to 180. Changing it to 60 will give you direct tailwheel steering for that 60 degrees either side of centre using the rudder alone - possibly easier to control but definitely unrealistic.

    Cheers,
    Paul.

    0
    K
     1 Reply
  • K

    @Delta558 Hi Paul, thanks for that. You're right that 60.0 gives you rudder steering of the tailwheel. It had looked so natural that I didn't notice that was happening. 0 doesn't give you castoring in P3D but 180 does as you said. However in the AH He.111 there is also a hydraulic dependency which stops the wheel castoring with differential brakes which is also unrealistic (hyds should not affect castoring). With asymmetric engine power the wheel castors correctly without hydraulics. In the brakes sections of aircraft.cfg hydraulic_system_scalar is set to 1.000. If you set that parameter to zero

    hydraulic_system_scalar=0.00000

    the hydraulic dependency on differential braking stops. So with the steering angle set to 180 and the brakes hydraulic scalar set to zero the tailwheel castors correctly regardless of the hydraulics being locked or not.

    0