Aileron problems and authority limiter mysteries

[Klapaucius]

I've got my little plane here, and I was changing the control surfaces to make it more responsive. 

 

You'll notice that the authority limiter is the same for all surfaces, yet they are going in opposite directions. Okay, maybe its because I placed them in non-standard orientation. So theoretically, if I shift the authority limiter for the outer set of ailerons,  it all should work fine. But here is the rub: while it changes the pitch direction to where I want it, the roll is now reversed.  Pressing the Q key should make the left side go up and the right go down, but instead I get the opposite.  You would think it would be all one way or the other.  Needless to say, it is very difficult to fly a plane this way.

The original configuration was just one set of ailerons, and it worked just fine.  What's going on here?

[Lisias]

Check the CoM.

The control surfaces works as independent entities - the symmetrical "brother" don't work by mimicking an surface setting. It does its own thing, that usually happens to be the symmetrical opposite of his "brother".

However, control surfaces behind your CoM works one way, and ailerons ahead the CoM works another.

See this post for further details (keep reading the follow ups)

 

[bewing]

Yup, control surfaces attached to swept wings are a big problem for the game. Especially if the CoM is anywhere near the point where the wing attaches.

 

[Foxster]

I avoid swept wings for this reason but have sometimes attached the control surfaces to the aircraft body and moved them into place on the wings with Shift-translate so that they work OK and still look good. 

[Klapaucius]

3 hours ago, bewing said:

Yup, control surfaces attached to swept wings are a big problem for the game. Especially if the CoM is anywhere near the point where the wing attaches.

 

That explains it.  The COM is quite close, which makes the plane twitchy but turn on a dime. It's a handful in this configuration but a blast if you keep on top of it.  I did also tweak the wing pitch as it was nosing down a bit in flight.  My original solution was to have pitch and roll completely separate, but that compromised the responsiveness quite a bit.  Thanks @Lisias as well.

[Klapaucius]

3 hours ago, Foxster said:

I avoid swept wings for this reason but have sometimes attached the control surfaces to the aircraft body and moved them into place on the wings with Shift-translate so that they work OK and still look good. 

Are the top wings affecting the bottom?  The lower wings are placed pretty much in the standard orientation.

[Gargamel]

I see this bug a lot, as I love swept wings, so when I see it, I just click "Deploy inverted", and that usually solves it, but not always. 

[Daniel Prates]

You can try to fool the game by inverting the surface's 'deploy direction',  from normal to reverse. This indeed happens because the game cant figure out what to do in some designs,  specially the avant-garde ones like yours. The game inverts: counter it by counter-inverting!

Its a commom thing, in my experience, in designs with both a tail elevator and a nose canard. You would imagine they would add to eachother but the opposite happens for some reason.

[Lisias]

On 6/5/2018 at 11:36 AM, Daniel Prates said:

The game inverts: counter it by counter-inverting!

I'm feeling pretty dumb right know. In my designs, I'm was fixing this by carefully trimming the Com with the tanks empty, and then filling up and setting flow priorities.

Edited June 8, 2018 by Lisias
Hit "post" too soon

[Daniel Prates]

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

I'm feeling pretty dumb right know. In my designs, I'm was fixing this by carefully trimming the Com with the tanks empty, and then filling up and setting flow priorities.

Yeah the game will trick you like that,  causing you to think something is logical when it isnt. 

Let me explain better the countering thing. 

In some designs,  I felt that there were not enough elevator authority from my rear placed elevators. I experimented by placing aditional foward canards,  thinking it would be a no brainer: twice the vectoring power,  right? Only... no. I got an effect where they anulled eachother. The visuals where right,  they would point to opposite directions when a pitch command was given (as they should) but for some reason the effect was they would simply cancel eachother out. Certainly a game thing, in RL in think this was not going to happen.

So I went all "spock-in-the-giant-amoeba-episode" and thought it would be logical to reverse the "deploy direction" data in the part's context menu. And it worked. I'm not happy with it though!

Edited June 8, 2018 by Daniel Prates