Online IL2

[Radtgaeb]

Well...I've been trying to get online to find some of you guys so I could possible pick your brains in-flight so as to get some helpful tips about the game; but, alas, I can't find any of you on Hyperlobby or whatever it's called.

Anyway, yeah. This goes along with my whole schtick about IL2 having inadequate training. That being said, this is a smash hit with me :up:. If only I could get off the ground and fly well whilst in formation :oops:

[Chock]

You might find other flight sims help with learning how to fly well. IL2 has a pretty realistic flight model, which means that you're essentially learning to fly on a high powered fighter plane - the real guys didn't do that, they used training aircraft of a lower power.

What I would do if I were you, is try out something like MS flight sim and learn to fly a single-seat training aircraft in that, doing the stuff that real pilots have to do, i.e. taking off, flying a circuit and landing repeatedly. There are lots of lessons in MS flight sim for that (and you can get a demo of MSFS or buy an older version of it cheap if you haven't got it). But, if you can't be bothered with that, or it sounds boring, you could do the same thing in IL2, but simply accept that it's going to be trickier!

I would suggest turning the realism settings down on IL2 and gradually reintroducing them one at a time as you get used to stuff. You are at a disadvantage in comparison to flying the real thing, as you don't have the feedback that you'd get in real life telling you what the aeroplane is doing.

The big problem in IL2 is getting used to high speed stalls (caused by pulling back on the stick too sharply and breaking up the airflow over the wing), in real life, you feel those coming on with buffeting on the elevators from the disturbed airflow, and it shakes the stick as the elevators vibrate. A force-feedback stick can help with that a bit, but it still aint like the real thing. A high speed stall in combat is going to make life hard. One thing you could try is using one of the higher-powered, but less agile aircraft, the technique for fighting in one of these is to zoom and dive, rather than turn and burn, i.e. making slashing attacks rather than dogfighting in the traditional sense, this sort of fighting requires less precise control of the rudder and doesn't involve tight turns, and is consequently less likely to result in a high speed stall.

Nevertheless, learning to fly your plane smoothly is important for air combat, as the smoother you fly, the more energy you'll retain (either potential energy from your height, or kinetic energy from your speed, both of which can be converted into the other by either diving or climbing), and as you probably know, the pilot with more energy available during a dogfight is going to be the one who wins, nine times out of ten (probably ten times out of ten actually).

Remember, you turn your plane with the wings, not the rudder - most air to air combat in prop planes barely uses the rudder for anything other than counteracting the engine torque (especially on take-off), and if you over-use the rudder, you'll lose energy and slow down!

Formation flying is tricky, but there is a trick to it, which takes a while to figure out even in real life. The trick is, let the airplane fly itself! As odd as it sounds, this is something that comes as a revelation to all pilots in real life when they get formation flying figured out, I remember when I sussed this out in real life and then felt like a real dumbass after some of the appalling attempts at formation I had made! Small corrections and very small throttle changes are the keys to success. In real life you have to worry about propwash from other aircraft too, but not many flight sims actually have that in them, so that's one nice thing about sims!

But there is one other trick to know for formation flying, and it's this: if you line up two similar parts on aircraft in your formation off to the side of you (say, both the canopies, for example), and then line those both up with something on your aircraft (for example a rivet on your cockpit canopy frame), you can concentrate on keeping those three things in line. This is the way most pilots do it in real life. However, without something like track-IR or multiple monitors to give you a wider field of vision, it's damn near impossible to do in a sim on just one monitor, so don't be too disheartened if you don't find it that easy, real aeroplanes are much easier to fly than simulated ones in general!

Like everything else though, practise makes perfect!

:D Chock