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Post by Tom Goodrick on Nov 5, 2008 20:34:52 GMT -5
The fix is usually a matter of increasing the wheel compression for the main wheels. This is the number just ahead of the value "2.5" which is the universal G for that amount of compressions. In the case of the Bristol, I changed it from 0.35 to 0.5 feet in this line:
point.2= 1.000, 3.000, 13.800, -9.100, 1600.000, 2.000, 2.000, 0.000, 0.500, 2.500, 0.850, 0.000, 0.000, 7.000, 0.000, 0.000
This seems to have fixed the problem in the many landings, taxiing and takoffs I made today. Here are some considerations. note the numbers 2.000, 0.000, 0.500, 2.500, 0.850 in the line above. The 2.000 is the radius of the wheel in feet. It merely gives you a hint of the scale but should not be considered directly related to the compression. The next value 0.000 is the mount of steering. The value 0.500 is the stroke of the gear to the 2.5 G loading. When the gear sits steady as parked, it experience 1.000 G of compression. I simplified rule in dynamics is that if you release a landing gear with a simple compressed spring that starts uncompressed and then falls very gently with gravity imediately compressing the spring until it pushes up with enough force to stop the compression, it will develop a force/weight ratio of 2.0 G's. Give it a little more as in a downward velocity at the start and you'll get close to 2.5 G's. This is universal so it should be this way in all landing gear specs in FS.
The compression of 0.5 ft is the total stroke of the landing gear at that 2.5 G force ratio. This sets the stiffness of the spring for static compression. Don't think of this as a compression of the tire itself. It is the entire compression stroke for the gear. It is vital to the physics of landing where the integral of the force over the stroke of the gear must equal the intitial downward energy of the gear. It absorbs the energy. The harder you hit (vertical rate), the more the gear will compress. On some well-made modern aircraft models for FS, you will see this compression.
The value 0.850 in the line above is the ratio of damping to critical damping. This can never be greater than 1.0 and normally lies between 0.7 and 0.95. To a large extent this behaves as in standard vibration theory. The higher the number the more the spring is damped so you won't bounce back into the air. But in a sim it plays a more significant role. The vertical rate determines the damping force in relation to this damping ratio. At the moment of first contact of the wheel, an upward force on the aircraft is generated proportional to the vertical rate and to this damping ratio. This can have a very bad effect on some landings. But it also helps eat up initial energy of impact. So it is a trade between generating too much initial force and taking the energy out of the bounce before something bad happens.
I just had an instance where the damping ratio played a big part. I was landing a T-33 jet trainer and rocked to the right just before touch-down. The force on the right main gave a big rotation to the left which almost resulted in contact of the left wing. In that case i increased the stroke slightly and decreased the damping from 0.95 to 0.85 and made the airplane easier to land though I try hard to keep the wings level during landing.
The only way to fix these problems is by trial and error with these numbers.
CG position is another big aspect of this but that is another book.
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Dec 11, 2008 22:20:17 GMT -5
Just when you think life passes slowly and easily here in the Deep South, things happen to make significant changes reminding us that we live in a dynamic environment. The fall has passed very quietly with moderate temperatures and very little rain.
Our cat situation has continued with some dynamics as well. The small kittens we had over the summer were all sold by Halloween at the vet's office where we left them. Their momma has settled into a routine living in our garage. My wife has worked out a way to rais the garge door abotu 5 inches and lean a piece of spare siding against the bottom of the door leaving a gap on one end for momma ca A.K.A. "Little One." For a while she had a companion - a gray male who was very friendly to us and to her. I thnk he was probably "fixed" by his former owners. I don't think he was a normal stray but just recently got lost, perhaps as someone moved out. For the past week he has not been seen. Other stray cats come and go each day, mainly to the back porch where my wife sets out food for the ones too nervous to come in the garage. Those have incoude for the past two weeks a momma and her two kittens that look about 8 - 10 weeks of age. They have take up residence under the rear deck of the vacant house to our north. They play there and then come over a few times a day for food. My wife makes sure the little ones get good cat food.
Today we lost three very fine trees we had planted a few years ago as a privacy screen and wind brake for our patio. It's not that we do any nude sun bathing but we like our privacy, especially from the neighbors to our south, the ones with three barking dogs - that tried to eat our three male house cats when they were stray kittens. These trees were Leyland Cypress, very nicely shaped "christmas trees". It happens I was just wandering about the back yard two days ago and admired these trees. They were each 6 feet tall when we bought them and planted them neatly 3 feet apart extending out from a spot 5 feet west from our house along the edge of the patio. This morning some weird wind three the middle one down to the south and the other two out to the west. Recent rains had saturated the ground so their roots did not hold at all. The one that went south lay down across fence containing the dogs. It did not break the fence. But we cut it at the base and pulled it around front laying it so it could be picked up by our city yard trash disposal but also so passing cars could see that it would make a great Christmas tree. (I'd give it away free.) We straightend up the other two trees and tied them in place. But thi evening the wind picked up again quite badly. I went out and cut the ropes and laid down the trees in a safe area. My measurement of the one we laid out this morning showed it was 22 feet long. In a day or two the two others will be cut and will join the first on our front yard. Each can make a great 7 to 10 foot Christmas Tree cut from the top.
My wife finished decorating our artificial tree last Sunday!
It's a shame. When you plant a tree you assume a sense of permanency about it. In the spring we'll find some nice bushes for a hedge. The trees were a replacement for bushes that grew too large and dropped fruit that made our dogs sick. But it makes me a little sick seeing those trees lying on the ground.
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Dec 26, 2008 11:28:34 GMT -5
Hope everybody had a Merry Christmas. Mine was pretty Merry until I got into a battle with VISTA! I got a new laptop. It came with VISTA and with a touch pad pointing device. Those two features quickly combined to drive me a little nuts.
It has a built-in mike and camera. In a while I'll figure out how to use the camera and get a new photo to use on this Forum. Yesterday I figured out how to use the mike to record short sounds from my horns and then play them back with a visulaizer that works like an audio spectrum analyser. That's a cool way to compare mouthpieces, reeds, ligatures - what we sax guys call "setups".
Now I may have an interest in trying to get FS9 to run on it. Has anyone succeeded in doing that? If not i may eventually try FSX. But its main job is to edit home movies into DVD's. I have a bunch of tapes covering five years of my granddaughter's life on digital tapes that can only be displayed now using my camcorder. I intend to transfer those to DVD for long-term saving with maybe a little editing as well.
But this VISTA was designed by someone who hated everyone in the world!
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budsbud
Member
Cross winds of life
Posts: 211
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Post by budsbud on Dec 26, 2008 16:57:08 GMT -5
Tom I have my other machine in a dual boot mode with Vista as well as XP and have MS FS9 on both. FS 9 runs fine under Vista. On my simm box I only have XP and am very happy with it running FS9. I think I need a better video card tho. Bud
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Post by flaminghotsauce on Dec 26, 2008 18:52:15 GMT -5
FS9 should run well on a machine that can run Vista. FSX might, depending on what kind of hardware it has.
What did you get?
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Dec 26, 2008 20:07:05 GMT -5
I got a Toshiba L305D-S5892 with 3 MB ram and 160 Gb drive. It has an AMD Turion 60 cpu and an ATI Radeon graphics card. The graphics card shares the system ram. The clock speed on the cpu is 2 gigs.
My son Craig got it for $350 at Best Buy but he had to wait from 7 pm Thanksgiving evening to 5 am the next morning to get it. He got ticket 17. He has done this before. Two years ago he got me the 19inch LCD flat screen monitor by doing that. Evidently he gets together with some friends and they have a little party there next to the store all night.
I was getting ready to buy one but was looking at 17 inch screens and more meory and drive space. But my wife was giving me static about it. Anyway, it was always intended mainly for video editing, not gaming. But if it runs FS9, it would work as a back up to my 8-year-old desk system. I also have to share this with my wife whose 12-year-old desk system (old one) is nearly gone.
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Post by flaminghotsauce on Dec 27, 2008 21:06:31 GMT -5
I dug around for specs. It looks like a dual-core 2.0 processor, 3 gigs of ram, video 128 to 831 shared memory. This is faster than either laptop I've tested FS9 on here. Twice the available memory too, after the Vista tax The shared graphics are always an awkward tradeoff, but since you have enough memory, it might be just fine. I look for it to run warm. FS9 should run really well, and you're going to want to keep it for yourself and give your wife your older machine.
You're in for a treat. Load it up today! OH, what about your pedals? Don't your rudders use the gameport? Or am I mis-remembering?
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Dec 28, 2008 19:15:08 GMT -5
This is the new computer online. All I had to do was plug in a phone line into the jack on the back and dig out my old ISP info.
At present I have no plans for gaming on this system.
I may not do much else on it either. It just took me to a page called "tab browsing" as I was typing.
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Dec 30, 2008 12:45:14 GMT -5
OLD COMPUTER SAVES NEW COMPUTER I have been busy learning how to do many things on the new computer. Things that were done easily on the old computer are hard to do on the new computer. Things like: shutting it off using Excel pluggin in a line from my camcorder to upload videos The first problem was the cause of the need to have the Old Computer save the New Computer. But that was only made possible by searches to find the solution to the last problem in the list. I had found the Toshiba site where there is duplicted info on my exact laptop model. So when my Toshiba (new computer) did not start, and after trying hitting many buttons to no avail, I knew what to do: get the Dell (old computer) on line to that Toshiba site and read the User's Guide. Notice how this problem was really caused by the modern method of putting all the info you need to know in the memory of the new computers leaving the customer with no books to read for help. There are many ways of turning these new computers OFF. What you NEVER NEVER want to do is tap the Power button! But then I knew about such thiings. On my old computer I always clicked on Start and then clicked on Shut Down. It went through a little sequence and then became quiet. On my old old computer I clicked on Sart and the Restart in DOS and then, after seeing a cursoe in DOS, pressed the Power button and it shut down. So I was used to simple things like that. But now I click on the Microsoft flag symbol for the Start menu and then do other things as told by sons Guru Craig and Guru Dr Scott. Craig said I could then click on the symbol of the Power button and it would shut down. It looked like it did but one light stayed on and slowly blinked all night. Scott told me to click on the > at the end of the line of icons in the Start window and then select the type of shut down I wanted to do. The options are: log off log on sleep hybernate shut down He explained that sleep kept the Window status alive but went to a low power state, hyberrnate was a partial shut down that did not use battery power but allowed easy resumption and shut down was the actual command to shut the computer down. When we initially tried it, it actually worked. Last night when I did it, it did not work. Some lights stayed on but I received no info on what to do. This morning the computer would not respond to anyting even though the power was plugged in. The answer was found using the Dell to read the Toshiba User's Guide: Hold down the power key for at least 10 seconds to clear whatever problem there was and restart the computer. It worked. I have run many spread sheets including Lotus 123 and Excel for many years and in many versions. I thought I would try a likttle exercise on the newest version of Excel lookiing at a list of Wii Bowling Ratings for several games and trying to deduce what formula is used to calculate the rating. I entered some data I had written down from a few Wii Bowling games as I started a new player. That went OK. Then, oops, I forgot to make an extra first column to count the games and needed a new row above the data for some fake initial values (0) when doing differences. Then I noticed that nothing looked the same. There was no Edit at the top. There was an Insert so I tried that. It changed the entire top area above the sheet with dozens of other options. None was what I wanted to do. Scott told me to simply right click on a row label and insert a row. It worked. A similar move inserted a column. "Haven't youi done that before?" "Never." Then I entered "=a" in a cell to start the formula for a difference, a7-a6. Suddenly right in the middle of my beautiful spreadsheet a box opened showing all the possible operations you could put in a formula that begine with "a." I exclaimed and complained about the distraction. I was told that was "autocomplete" that tries to guess what you want to do and help you do it. I was to accept it and not complain. [Expletive deleted.] I soon gave up and dumped the sheet. I'll do it on the Dell using my comfortable old version of Excel which has never demonstrated any inadequacy or affrontery. Then there is the matter of connecting my camcorder. I new it was going to be bad day when I started entering my old software with which I had connected in 2003 to the Dell and saw the message "This USB Driver is incompatible with Vista." I will save you the trouble of the hours spent with my two expert consultants trying to figure that all out. There must be a good driver for this camcorder somewhere but it is not evident. Sony says it should already be in Vista. The cable should connect fine even though it is a USB going iinto a USB2 jack. Toshiba has not said anything on their site. I have to call them. [Expletive Deleted]
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Ed Burke
Member
Healthy living is fine, but it's having fun that keeps us going!
Posts: 433
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Post by Ed Burke on Dec 30, 2008 15:51:15 GMT -5
An excellent word to describe most things to do with Vista, "affrontery".
Ed
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budsbud
Member
Cross winds of life
Posts: 211
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Post by budsbud on Dec 30, 2008 20:11:29 GMT -5
Tom Now you can see why I stay with Win p and FS9 I have been there and done that also. Best of luck
Bud
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Post by flaminghotsauce on Jan 3, 2009 19:44:19 GMT -5
I must say, I agree with your assessment of Vista. It is really dumbed down, or targeted for people that are prone to screw things up. sort of. That angle of design is MOST annoying.
I don't like the spreadsheet program, the word program and there's a few other areas I don't like. I've been contemplating contacting HP to see if I can get a "downgrade" XP disc.... It would be better for gaming at least.
Did you make your backup DVDs? Mine took three DVDs to back up Vista.
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Post by pterodactyl (George) on Jan 4, 2009 23:46:11 GMT -5
I purchased a new computer from Dell for my wife and it came with Vista. I am fairly computer savy. I started with the old Comodore 64 and worked my way up to what I have now. I use my computer at home and at work extensively for my job. I eventually had to remove Vista from my wifes computer and found one of the last unused copies of XP out there. My wife is happy, I am happy. Vista sucks.
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Jan 5, 2009 10:59:11 GMT -5
I have been using computers since the 1960's when I started programming FORTRAN on main frames. I have run on several main frames, Atari's, Radio Shack TRS-80's, Ollivetti and hewlett-Packard programmable calculators (desktop and pocket), for PC's with all previous versions of Windows and several special computers for data acquisition and onboard flight controls. I have written codes in BASIC, assembly language for 6502, 8080 and 8085 and even in Python. I wrote the executive code in PROMS for a guidance computer in 8080 assembly code. Working for the Army, I had one of the first Intel Development computers.
But VISTA is perplexing in its complexity, making the simplest operations difficult.
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Post by Tom Goodrick on Jan 7, 2009 11:03:27 GMT -5
My battle with Vista continues with some wins (where I learn to do things despite Vista's resistance) and some losses (where Vista succeeds in squelching my productivity).
The problem with zip files was solved. It was caused by me in naming a big 2.2Mb file four years ago when I saved it as a back up on a CD. It was a zipped file so I named it "filezip" with no period. (What inspired that I don't know.) My eyesight is poor enough working with the high res screen on the laptop so I looked at that many times and missed the fact there was no period. Merely renaming it as file.zip solved the problem so that right-clicking on it caused it to be unzipped as Flaming had said it would. The contents were many files that were then easily worked with.
However it was then I discovered some quirks of Vista including a falat flaw that renders many of my programs written over several years unusable. That unzipped file turned out to contain four folders for a total of 10 Mb. Three contained small text files and one contained a binary executable and some DOS Batch files. The whole thing was my boat sim that was designed to operate under DOS. Vista has a mode called "C:>" which appears to be DOS. First, copying the individual folders all into one big operating folder was tough. Then I found the program would run through the input portion where you select a boat. But then there was a graphical section that depicted boat performance and that drew the message "Vista does not support full screen graphics in this mode." Execution stopped. Well, that killed the whole thing because it is mostly full-screen graphics.
That was extremely dissapointing because I have two other serious programs from my days at NASA, developed by me as a NASA engineer that were also written to run in DOS mode. All three programs were based on compiled GW BASIC programs that created full-screen graphics in reasonably high res. One enabled the design of entry vehicles from space using hyperellipses to creat smooth surfaces with desired aerodynamic properties. The other program took that data to simulate gliding to a landing area on the surface of the Earth. It allowed manual control to handle the heat of entry as well as the navigation to the landing area with data files for Excel showing deceleration and heating levels. It enabled orbital motion blending with aerodynamic flight in 3 D around a spherical Earth with rotating atmosphere. I did these in BASIC because I was not getting paid to write C code that would have taken many times longer to complete than BASIC. BASIC did the job very nicely and was comiled into executable code that ran as efficiently as most C code would run. Now it is no longer possible to run those programs except on my old computer. That is progress in today's world. I'll keep my old computer running as long as I can.
I have few uses for the new laptop. It cannot yet process the camcorder video tapes but I am still hopeful it will. I have exhausted the aid of the people from Sony. It has quit connecting me to the Internet. I double click on the icon for the Internet and it gives me a page saying "working off line" and sits there with no dialing of the ISP. I can manually force it to dial the ISP and when that happens I can verify that it is connected to my ISP. But Internet Explorer still gives me the "working offline" message.
Craig also gave me a very nice printer that can work with that laptop. (No printer can work with my old computer because the printer chip burned out in a lightning strike.) But the only thing I will have to print is music once I get a $10 download program working. Haven't done that yet because I have been unsure if I can download a program and then run it.
One very good thing I can do with this laptop is to record short musical segments using my horns and then do a spectral analysis as I listen to the replays. I did have to find and dust off some good microphones I used 30 years ago. But this helps me in picking the best mouthpiece for the soprano sax and learning ways to play them effectively. A problem with the saxophone is that much of what the player hears is transmitted through bones from the teeth and is different from what people in the room would hear. Another problem is that it is tough to mic a sax because the sound vibration comes off many parts of the horn. I have had good success and can even freeze a spectrum as a .jpg photo.
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