Some news regarding the repair of the MiG-29 flight model? It’s currently working really badly. It has even worse energy retention than the MiG-21 and it is less agile than F-4E (possible some exaggeration but the point is clear).
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Why did they even make these FM changes, was it a Rogue Coder or something? Did someone make some sourceless BS bug report and gaijin just said yeah we destroy it’s FM now?
I am having a very hard time understanding the reasoning behind it , especially the fact that it happened at the same time with the UFO F-16 FM buffs
They implemented a new system for RateMax and LoadFactorMax to a bunch of aircraft including F-16s, deltas, Mirage 2000, etc.
When they did this, it broke the MiG-29 (although I think the MiG-29 was already underperforming still at that point).
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/398367636213334018/1155267697634988032/image.png
Beyond this, they’ve nerfed the efficiency of the flaps, the drag and lift in high AoA or spin conditions, etc. They’ve made the aircraft really unstable and unrealistically bad at nose pointing conditions. Any kind of AoA above the normal 14-24 degree limit results in excessive loss of airspeed and comically large instability.
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So what is this RateMax system supposed to do ?? Previous Mig29 FM had BIG issues with AoA, especially in sim battles, it strangely seems to have more AoA now but the energy bleed is horrendous. Afaik, we have lots of informations about how the 29 behave and yet we can’t have a proper FM, and the F16 is even better at low speeds than the 29…
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Don’t take what I am saying now as certain, but from the tests I did today the MiG-29 9-12 rate actually matches pretty well this charts https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1130043915404320818/1154776868256497774/7-718665.png at all but the lowest speeds (under 460kph) where it underperforms a bit.
The 9-13 instead is probably worse than it should be (given only 200kg difference), but still not too far off.
Here is where problems start: the turn times on the graph I linked above (which is the one they used to responded to my bug report) matches perfectly with the Gs this chart (6.14 in particular)
provides only at speeds above 400 kph, then below that the turn times are too low when compared to the number of Gs.
The fact that those 2 graphs (at least 6.15) should be right for sustained turn rates overloads seems to be confirmed by the fact that this: GAF T.O. 1F-MIG29-1 Flight Manual Mig-29 , which is from the MiG29G manual (same aircraft as 9-12A), has perfectly identical figures for 5000m.
Instead in 6.17 (the one they answered with), unless my google translate completely fucked up the translation, seems to calculate the minimum turn radius at various speed and then calculate the time it takes for the aircraft to do a 360 degree turn at that radius. In theory the minimum radius for a certain speed should equate to the maximum sustained load at that speed, the only explanation for this I can think of is that, since to achieve those small turn radiuses the aircraft pulls some serious AoA, a now very significant part of the force that acts vertically to the plane is not centripetal but just related to the aircraft “drifting” in the air (same reasons you could hit 16Gs in DCS)… but in game the AoA of the MiG29 is quite garbage, and while rate times should be correct, irl they were done with the aircraft pulling almost certainly more AoA that it is currently doing, which means that the induced drag the aircraft has at the current maximum AoA of about ~22 degrees is too much.
At higher sustained speed this is not an issue both because of lower AoA and (maybe) too low standard drag coefficient (I don’t know if the MiG29 could hit 1575kph on the deck, most sources I see state 1525kph as max speed).
Apart from all of this, it seems to me that many aircraft are completely over performing in rate fights. Apart from the F-16A, that we all know is an UFO right now while it should rate very similar to the MiG29, ,many other aircraft like the MiG23MLA right now can rate at absurd degrees second (managed to hit 25 in the MLA with min fuel and no missiles), which is way more than what it was capable in real life.
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Efficiency of the flaps though was right to be nerfed… with the old flight model when using mouse aim with flaps the sustained turn improved so much that at 430kph it achieved the same deg/sec as the optimal 700kph…
Well, as stated the sustained turn performances are correct because they are below the available AoA limitations between 14 and 24 degrees. The issue is that the aircraft loses too much lift, and has too much incurred drag above these values. Further, the instability at AoA higher than 24 degrees is far too high. The director of TsAGI’s papers suggests the aircraft does not suffer these instabilities unless oscillations develop over time.
As such, a quick vertical acceleration beyond the 50-60 degree AoA or nose pointing region results in complete flow separation over the top of the wing. This means the instability goes away, the aircraft is now in a post-stall region unaffected by wing rock or other instabilities. The nose comes back down, and the aircraft recovers with little effort or loss of control.
This is simply not possible in-game.
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Doing this same maneuver in the MiG-29 would result in an unrecoverable spin and death.
The F-16 was not known for these qualities. The F-16 was known for having severe pitch-out departure doing stuff like this, that is why the flight control system was so restrictive in the first place. They were designed to not allow the pilot to go into regions of post-stall to avoid such issues entirely and make for no-error flight no matter what pilot wants to do.
The MiG-29 had a different philosophy of allowing the pilot to enter post-stall regions and the design of the aircraft was as such that it could very easily recover from these regions. In-game the roles are flip-flopped and there are no restrictions preventing you from going into post-stall regions for either.
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Wasn’t this because the flaps would lock you up a bit and bring you to a higher speed where you rated better?
This wasn’t exactly the case originally. The flaps would decrease AoA and cause a slight acceleration but then would just be excess drag and lower AoA.
Then they fixed them to produce more lift, increase available AoA…
Now they increase AoA but the aircraft loses all lift and has excessive drag at higher AoA.
It has too much induced drag even between 14-24 AoA, and this in practice makes also sustained turn worse in air RB, where the instructors just always pulls 22 degree AoA, and at that AoA the plane should be keeping an higher speed than it is doing right now.
Bs flight model
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I think it is clear, there is game balance decisions being made instead of changes based on realism.
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To be honest I wouldn’t have any problems with nerfing the SMT performance even more than 1000kg should do given the weapons it has. What pisses me off is the nerf to the MiG29As and the F-16A arcade flight model.
Also it seems as I said before that not only the MiG29 and the F-16 but many planes got completely wrong fm after the update. I’ll look at the MiG23ML flight manual again but there’s no way it’s supposed to do over 25 degrees/sec
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I’m sure the F-16 being an UFO and the MİG-29s being flyings bricks is a healthy “BALANS” decision
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I wish the developers would sometimes communicate with us here , we do not even know if they will ever fix it or leave it in a broken state like this.
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The MLA used to do a circle in about 18 seconds before (the reason why I preferred it over the MLD since it could at least outperform the F-14A in that metric). Tested it just now and it finishes it in a whopping 15 seconds, wtf. I looked at the FM, and it seems to me the only change that has been made is to engine temperatures. So I guess something changed about the logic that goes into simulating the FM, and not the parameters.
Am I correct or am I not seeing something here?
Yeah it’s absolutely bonkers lol
not missing anything, it seems that they did something that fucked up all flight models