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1. 61 6 7 How togetstarted s can rta ar da Be He 61 CONTENTS xiii 7 Combat maneuvers 63 1 1 Enereyhehting cueca a aa a 63 7 2 Maneuverability 63 SA A rn amp Bene Ar A 63 7 2 2 Alt tude 2 22 a e ss ara er we i a 63 1 2 3 Iheirplane alas a her ein 63 7 2 4 Corner speed n n naaa 64 7 2 5 Use of secondary control surfaces 64 7 3 Basic maneuvers mono 64 1 31 Break a a o Pa a PAS AS ee 64 7 3 2 Aileron Roll 64 13 8 Barrel Toll 2 aad 40 oA d 8 ra a de dr 64 7 3 4 Chandelles and the combat turn 64 1 3 8 YO VOB 60 A046 Eee ieh 64 Ro LOOPS qiies a en a ee ea a 64 7 4 Advanced maneuvers 2 222 2 om onen 64 TAN SCISSORS os Sui ie ee en ee a 64 T42 Hammerhead 4 42 sia a Aw er 64 7 4 3 Spiral climb 64 TAA Snap roll a s so arta ra we nta ER a 4 64 8 Ground pounding and fighter tactics 65 8 1 Ground attack iron a a ana ar aa a 65 8 1 1 Desirable aircraft features 66 8 1 2 Delivering the payload 66 8 13 Exiting co ai Wa Nope Bs eres ne pe Seok Gels de X 71 8 14 Targets rebu rk we 2 Sa ee ae SR 72 8 1 5 Teamrtacties ss se cee nas eras SS 74 8 1 6 SUMMARY casas ee Sa eka PAS OS 75 8 2 TICES in BF ci ee by Bag 8 ae amp Gas ta aR By a 75 8 3 Team tactics s s 3 ande wees waren 75 8 3 1 Formation lying 75 8 3 2 Fo
2. For some people this interface is completely intuitive for others con fusing It s no reason to brag or be ashamed people s brains just work differently The great thing about the Quick Mission Builder or QMB is that it is well quick and easy to learn to manipulate The down side is that it isn t very flexible This tool is primarily useful for designing and hopping straight into quick encounters or training sessions without any bother about historical accuracy or a higher level ofimmersion Add comments on how it works 10 9 Single missions 10 10 Pilot career campaigns Use of autopilot 10 11 Multiplay flying online 10 11 1 Dogfights 10 11 2 Coops 10 12 Full Mission Builder FMB The Full Mission Builder or FMB is the tool to use for creating new mis sions of all levels of complexity including simple maps for your own use online dogfight maps coop missions and full blown campaigns Unless you fly a single mission campaign or other mission prepared in ad vance by someone else this is the only method you have for accessing 10 13 Demo the Berlin Kuban Kursk Lvov Moscow summer Prokhorovka Stal ingrad and online maps since only the Smolensk Crimea and Moscow winter maps are available from the QMB Thanks to the work of a considerate member of the community there isn t much else to write here in terms of explanations of how to use the FMB A complete and easy to read Mission Builder Guide has be
3. The chapter entitled Advanced topics picks up where Flight left off goes into further practical detail about flying Don t let the title fool you these are still basic topics However they are not critical enough to have a high priority in the writing process The IL 2 features and references gets into some of the details con cerning the settings that you can control organized by menus and start ing from the main menu It goes beyond simply describing the features offering advice from those who have been there and spent hours learn ing the advantages gained and making mistakes In Technical hints you will find information about the various hard ware settings general recommendations concerning the computer system components and their relevance to performance of IL 2 some comments about the flight model and a few hints about useful external hardware The final chapter The IL 2 community you can read some com ments about online resources notably the main IL 2 related websites and basic information and advice about squadrons CHAPTER 2 Air war on the Eastern Front CHAPTER 3 Machines of war In total with IL 2 FB and IL 2 installation you ll get 129 air craft at least 80 of which are flyable advertisement for Forgotten Battles There are a lot of planes to learn about in IL 2 To be specific there are 51 Allied aircraft 36 of which are flyable and 31 Axis aircraft 14 of which
4. oe ee ed oe 11 3 Flight model 2 o ee eee eas 11 3 1 Known issues CONTENTS CONTENTS 11 4 System performance DEA ee a ea nn dr ae 95 11 6 Useful external hardware 99 11 7 Burther help ocet y aeu BDA RE ARES 99 12 The IL 2 community 101 12 1 The official forums 2 sron ee rera ee es 101 12 2 Online resources 0 2 2 0 0 00000 ee ee eee 101 12 3 How much istoomuch 102 124 Squadrons 2 vl 2 200 See SS Sa eee AS RS ws 102 Acknowledgements 103 CHAPTER 1 Introduction Be sure Oleg Maddox creator of IL 2 Sturmovik IL 2 Sturmovik is a very rewarding WWII combat simulator with highly realistic flight and damage models and gunnery excellent graph ics and eye boggling effects attention to detail and historical accuracy together with a large number of surface objects and flyable and Al planes and fantastic online play Add to that the unique setting among WWII sims of the Eastern Front unprecedented regular interaction of its cre ators with users bug free stable operation the consistent public re lease of patches to implement requested updates for flight models acous tics gunnery etc and to add on free new aircraft and you can t help but start to get the impression that the whole project is nothing less than a labor of love It is no wonder then that it has also become quite popular among WWII combat simulation enthusiasts and earned a
5. It s useful in takeoffs landings avoiding stalls flying forma tion avoiding structural damage finding optimal climb rates and in nearly every aspect of combat It can also indicate whether your engine is performing up to par or if something is amiss damage induced drag or forgotten flaps or landing gear Be careful when interpreting the gauge it is the indicated airspeed not the true airspeed so it doesn t compensate for wind or altitude Watch the units too American made craft may indicate mph instead of kph 1 mile 1 6km Artificial horizon Also called the flight indicator or attitude indicator This gyroscopic instrument indicates the attitude of your airplane or its pitch and roll the angles of your nose and wings relative to the ground If for example you bank left the line or figure repre senting the airplane will tilt to the left left side is lower in the same measure your wings do If you raise the nose instead the line representing the horizon will go lower than the line repre senting the airplane If you re in a taildragger on the runway the horizon line will already be a little below the airplane line The dif ferent gauges represent this somewhat differently but with some effort you will be able to figure it out This instrument is especially handy if you can t see the horizon very well You can t necessarily rely on it to give you an instant orientation when the nose of the aircraft is very far from the ho
6. hill There s another misconception you might be under and that is that pulling and pushing on the stick makes the airplane go up and down What it does do is cause the elevator or flipper to deflect up and down respectively The change in lift of the deflected flipper causes the pitch of the airplane to change in the direction of the deflection That s what pushing and pulling on the stick does it changes your pitch The stick seems to work as an up down control most of the time but the truth is you have to work with the stick and the throttle together to determine airspeed and change altitude We ll come back to this Alright so much for those misconceptions Understanding more cor rectly what does happen will pay off so let s be a little more precise We ll start with an example Imagine an airplane flying along in level flight meaning it is flying straight ahead without changing speed or altitude In fact have a look at the first picture in figure 6 where a SThis name is somewhat of an unfortunate misnomer since it gives a wrong impres sion of the function 25 26 Angle of attack Ground school 60 throttle Figure 4 1 In the first picture Oleg is flying his LaGG 3 in level flight see sec tion 5 6 at about 310kph In the second he has smoothly added throttle and begun to climb Itis clear that the angles of pitch and climb have increased al though the angle of attack has not The airspeed has not appre
7. the MP reading will increase with decreasing rpm this gauge is a good measure of power and can and should be used to set the throttle for a desired power setting It is also useful for troubleshooting Usually you cannot develop full manifold pressure in a damaged engine and you shouldn t want to anyway except in an emergency Tachometer This is the engine s speed in revolutions per minute Air planes of the era have relatively low engine speeds In planes that have constant speed propellers the tachometer is used for pro peller governor settings It is used with the manifold pressure gauge for engine management and diagnosis Oil temperature and pressure This gauge lets you know when your engine is warm when it is normal and when it is cooking Over heating the engine causes damage and you can use this gauge to help prevent it When the oil pressure becomes abnormal the engine is probably damaged In some planes oil temperature and pressure are shown on separate gauges on others they are inte grated into an engine gauge unit Coolant temperature As with the oil when the coolant temperature goes above the marked limit it is time to think about cooling the engine just like in a car If you let the engine get too hot you will hear the engine fluids boiling Propeller pitch The Luftwaffe aircraft have a Luftschraube Stellungs anzeige that is a propeller position indicator As the pilot varies the propeller control this indicato
8. the firing solution harder to find than if you are flying in the vertical plane at a constant speed Unfortunately for us this tactic is less use ful in the game computers are much better at this kind of deflection shooting problem than human gunners A major real world benefit to the high exit was that climbing into the sun through haze or into cloud all successful ways of throwing off anti aircraft fire Again none of these factors will impede the accuracy of the AAA in the game the only envi 73 74 Ground pounding and fighter tactics ronmental element you can use to your advantage is physical obstruc tion between you and the bullets firing at you Fire can even hit you if there is no line of sight between you and the gun firing at long range anti aircraft will lob its fire high over intervening obstacles and down onto you Don t assume you re safe once you can t see the defensive bat teries 8 1 4 Targets It is important to use an appropriate weapon for a given target The main types of target you will encounter listed in roughly ascending or der of toughness are anti aircraft guns soft skinned vehicles parked aircraft boats armored vehicles buildings and structures in IL 2 this category is essentially confined to bridges and ships The following targets are listed beginning with the weakest Editor s note the remainder of this section has not yet been edited Sorry mikeyg007 Anti Aircraft guns AA als
9. 26 194 131 aerodynamics1 Stability Page2 html 19 108 BIBLIOGRAPHY 9 D F Rogers Turn performance http web usna navy mil dfr flying turnwide pdf 2001 19 10 A Bush Boom and zoom tactics parts 1 4 http www simhq com _air air_024a html 2000 5 7 3 11 A Bush Air to air gunnery theory and application parts 1 3 http www simhq com _air air_028a html 2000 6 1 5 12 J Boyd Patterns of conflict http www d n i net boyd pdf poc pdf 1986 24 13 J Boyd Organic design for command and control http www d n i net boyd pdf c c pdf 1986 24 14 K J Good Got a second boyd s cyle OODA cycle http www patrolandbeyond com tactical_notes ooda_cycle htm 24 15 D Ham STURMOVIKTECHNIKA http www il2center com technika 2003 6 5 16 A Bush Air combat basics The scissors maneuver http www simhq com _air air_054a html 2003 7 4 1 17 R L Shaw Fighter Combat Tactics and Maneuvering Naval In stitute Press 1985 8 2 18 D Ham Aircraft Controls in IL2 Sturmovik http www il2center com technika features 011018 htm 2001 29 19 Sotka Full Mission Builder Guide http www il2center com technika builder02 htm 2002 20 1C Maddox Games IL 2 Sturmovik official website http www il2sturmovik com
10. 310kph Here s a hint the flight model isn t wrong real airplanes behave this way too What happened Increasing the power does pull the plane forward but the trim tab immediately reacts and changes the pitch so the wings convert the added power into altitude see section 4 7 If you don t understand that yet don t sweat the main thing is to notice that the throttle controls power What is that power good for Three things 1 Overcoming drag to maintain speed and altitude which is neces sary most of the time 2 Climbing 3 Speeding up Had Oleg wanted his LaGG to speed up but maintain the current altitude he would have added throttle and at the same time pushed the stick slightly forward Burn this into your brain The stick and the throttle work together to determine air speed and altitude The stick together with elevator trim controls angle of attack and in so doing determines airspeed Airspeed is linked to altitude by means of the power curve and because you can convert between the two We ll see more about this in section 5 3 The throttle controls power Is that burned in yet We put an engine in the airplane so that we can over come drag speed up and or climb The majority of this discussion is parallel to 4 where the topics are covered in more detail This discussion is geared to meet our needs in IL 2 but if you d like to learn more you know where to look 4 7 Secondary control surfaces 4 7 Second
11. In re ally busy online missions you also see slow PC s flying a little unevenly when things get busy This is because net updates are delayed in the same way on overwhelmed machines 11 3 1 Known issues Overbanking bank angle dihedral effect and accelerated stall spin sus ceptibility whatever else could compile a list 11 4 System performance System requirements CPU RAM Graphics card Hard disk 115 Lag This interesting post was made on the forums by RAF74_Wall dog It hasn t been edited but is also deemed interesting as an example of the kind of advice that can be provided here S All When you start getting into network topics such as lag in a flight simulator you start getting into some pretty murky waters How it works is actually entirely up to the code 112 however does it the easy way which is to let the computer doing the shooting determine whether or not it registered any hits as someone else mentioned There are pluses and minuses to this approach The plus is that if you see something you can hit it If the player computer only sent the server where it fired bulletts and let the server decide based on plane positions what was a hit which is another way a game could do this then lag would be a huge issue because you would have to lead your target by enough not only to make up for your target s speed but also to make up for your lag And while lag may be somewhat 97 98 Technical hints stab
12. K 4 Kurfurst 12 Machines of war FW 190 The Focke Wulf 190 fighter series is one of the two main fighter types for the Luftwaffe When they first saw action in the skies in 1942 the high qualities of this high altitude fighter were swiftly recognized and it was considered by many to be the most superior fighter of that time There are three types available for you to fly the FW 190A 4 A 5 and A 8 The FW 190D 9 is present but Al only He 162 L A R 80 MC 202 Folgore Me 262 The Schwalbe which Hitler wanted to employ as a bomber is not flyable in IL 2 This beautiful machine was made flyable for For gotten Battles You can find out more information about it at Stewart s Me 262 Guide 3 2 2 Ground attack aircraft He 111 The Heinkel 111 level bomber is present in the game as Al only In Forgotten Battles it has been made flyable thanks to the cockpit work by Xanty You can find out more at Stewart s He 111 Guide Hs 129 B 2 B 3 Wa Waffentraeger LA R 81 Dive bomber Ju 87 The Junkers 87 Stuka is possibly the most famous and recog nizable aircraft of WWII Stuka stands for Sturzkampfflugzeug literally fall combat aircraft what we call dive bomber The B 2 type is flyable with the version 1 2 patch and the D 3 and G 1 types are AI only Learn more about this awe inspiring machine that struck abject fear into the hearts of many at Stewart s Stuka Guide Ju 88 This medium sized Junkers bomber
13. Second World War by all major air forces Planes such as the FW 190 had variations purpose built for the ground attack role but any fighter could be used for ground attack An alternative approach to ground attack was the use of the light bomber the Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber being the most famous example The Stuka was a key component of the early success of the German Blitzkrieg in 1940 The Soviets produced the unique IL 2 a specialist ground attack plane which carried a diverse range of bombs rockets and guns This heavily armored aircraft was the terror of the German tank divisions on the Eastern Front 68 Ground pounding and fighter tactics 8 1 1 Desirable aircraft features Good armor and robustness Statistically ground attack is one of the most perilous activities a combat pilot can undertake The princi pal hazard is the flak Ground attack requires the pilot to get low and close to targets often well defended by Anti Aircraft artillery It is likely that a ground attack aircraft will be hit by the AA barrage so a plane structure and engine that can sustain damage and still function are ad vantageous and ample armor plating of important areas principally the pilot and the engine is typically used Wide variety of payloads Rockets with various warheads bombs of various types and large caliber weapons typically 20mm or more can all be useful depending on the nature of the target in ground attack The ability to car
14. a glimpse into the horrible historical struggle that is the setting of this fun simulator The tremendous suffering and appalling loss of life in this theater on a scale so massive it defies your comprehension is awing and is to be appreciated However the goal for this work is to create for its readers a sense of immersion in the sim so the account ought to focus on the air war and the hardy men and women who carried it out and lived to tell about it The chapter Machines of war will supplement the generous helping of information you will find in the object viewer click View Objects from the main menu to provide you with a better idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the aircraft in the simulator based on user experi ence Ground school is meant to ground you in the basics of flight the things you need to learn before taking off You will be familiarized with the cockpit and its main instruments learn how to taxi clear up some misconceptions you may well have about how an airplane reacts to con trol inputs and find out what secondary control surfaces are all about The topics covered in Flight will prepare you for training and sharp ening your skills during training and combat In addition to an intro duction to the critical concept of energy operation of the aircraft under such normal procedures as take off turning maintaining level flight climb and descent and landing are all covered It s probably less tedio
15. a zoom climb However if you are maintaining airspeed in a steady climb then setting a higher pitch for a lower airspeed will help you climb more steeply although not more quickly Of course there is a limit to the steepness and lower airspeed which makes sense In any case whether you zoom climb or climb with a steady speed be it quickly or steeply you should use the stick to start leveling off before you reach the new altitude to prevent overshooting it You ll also need to throttle back to resume your desired cruise speed If the climb is long enough to warrant using trim to relieve pressure on the stick and hold the climb steady be sure to trim the nose back down for cruise The reason you need stick control in all cases is explained more closely in 5 4 Takeoff section refssec phugoids on phugoid oscillations 5 3 1 The power curve 5 3 2 Examples 5 4 Takeoff Under certain circumstances taking off is the easiest thing that there is to do in an airplane Let s get started Your commander has ordered you to get out and try some basic flight maneuvers It s a still and sunny day and the long paved runway shimmers outside the windscreen The engine is started up and warm and you ve just had breakfast with coffee and are feeling good You ve completed your pre flight checklist checked all your flight surfaces and oriented yourself on the runway There are no obstacles around such as trees or raises in elevation Now what do you
16. adapted for dive bombing Note that your line of flight is not exactly the same as the line of fire indicated by your gunsight You will find that as you dive the point on the ground you are heading towards will be above your gunsight Test this by watching carefully what happens as you dive without altering your dive angle by adjusting the controls The terrain beyond the point at which you are diving will appear to recede and move up the screen and conversely the terrain on your side of the aiming point will appear to move down the screen disappearing under the nose of your plane The still point from which the terrain appears to expand is the true point towards which you are flying You can use the top of the reflector gunsight glass as a rough guide for my aiming point in a dive As you near the target the difference between the point under your gunsight pipper and your true aiming point will decrease This means that you will see your target slowly drift down towards then through your gunsight Let this happen naturally keep the angle of the dive constant Make sure that when you release your bombs you are de scending along a dead straight line Any yaw or pitch will wreck your aim When the altitude warning horn sounds the gunsight should be approximately on the target If you are descending vertically simply release your bombs disengage the dive brakes and pull out If however you are diving at an angle less than 90 your bombs wi
17. aircraft with the keyboard you very probably don t need this guide Sound Sound is a resources hog If you re having frame rate troubles one of the first things you should try as an experiment is turning off sound You can also disable or reduce the hardware sound acceleration level If you are using DirectX as a sound engine you can do this by running dxdiag and adjusting under the Sound tab Network 11 1 2 conf ini window game width 800 Arcade 0 height 600 HighGore 1 ColourBits 16 HakenAllowed 1 DepthBits 16 mapPadX 0 6689453 StencilBits 0 mapPadY 0 046875 ChangeScreenRes 1 viewSet 3 FullScreen 1 Intro 0 DrawlfNotFocused 0 NoSubtitles 0 EnableResize 0 NoChatter 0 EnableClose 1 NoHudLog 0 NoLensFlare 0 11 2 Terminology 11 2 Terminology frames per second antialiasing anisotropic etc 11 3 Flight model Editor s note taken directly from a forum post by Tully this section needs editing but can be useful anyway There are a bunch of different ways to arrive at more or less the same result all demanding different amounts of calculations The more closely you require the sim to match real performance the more calcula tion you require and the more powerful the PC you need to do it without suffering an unacceptable performance hit Most sims to date have take a short cut by working out a cheat sheet of average figures for things climb rate and acceleration at dif ferent ranges of speed and alti
18. also vary the angle of attack with the stick and trim to achieve the airspeed desired for climbing You might or might not already have guessed it but the airspeed is linked to the way the airplane climbs If you choose the second method then to climb faster more vertical meters gained per second you could change the airspeed to the air speed corresponding to the maximum rate of climb This is called V and as it turns out might not be very different than your given cruise speed No we haven t yet said how the airspeed affects climb rate Ifin the example you were cruising at 280 kph and the airspeed for optimal rate of climb were 300 kph then you might actually put the nose ever so slightly down add power and upon gaining the extra 20kph make small pitch adjustments with the stick and trim to keep the airspeed at 300 kph If you again choose the second method but instead would like to steepen the climb more vertical meters per horizontal meter you could hold the stick back a little while adding throttle This will slow you down and you won t climb as quickly in a steady climb There is also an airspeed V that corresponds to the maximum climb angle In a zoom climb trading airspeed for altitude the steeper the pitch the faster you ll trade airspeed for altitude the limit being a purely vertical climb Make sure you understand the distinction from a steady but steep climb You can trade in excess airspeed for increased altitude in
19. are really hitting anyone If you think of the pack ets as saying basically I m at location XY shooting at plane 123 and missing with 100 of my bullets you would simply alter your packets to take out the part that says you are missing with 100 of my bullets and insert something that says hitting with 100 of my bullets Now that s a major over simplification of how a god gun can be created for a flight simulator luckily it s not as easy as that makes it sounds but it is how it is done Hopefully Oleg has software within the game s server code that looks for this kind of thing Red Baron 3D did not have any code on the server that looked for god guns and consequently a number of people had them It isn t hard to imagine a person programming a hot key to turn their god gun on and off When they want to force a hit they simply hit the hot key to turn it on and then whatever they shoot at they hit and they hit with 100 of their bullets ve been using my parser for over a year now and can see conclusively that the BETTER online pilots only hit with 10 or so of their bulletts so do the math Even if Oleg has code to try to catch 11 5 Lag sod guns though it s a game of cat and mouse with the hackers trying to figure out how to cheat without the server picking it up Other things that are possible by the server letting the planes tell it where they are is the intentional lag warp that pl
20. but keep in mind that with some effort you might learn something useful A lot of this manual was written with a joystick on the desk Its main reference is IL 2 itself beyond stemming from user experience a lot of checking was done to make sure this and that were correct and really so in the simulator Another important source of the material in this book was the IL 2 community notably those at the Ubi IL 2 Sturmovik forums especially in General Discussion and Technical Support Every effort is being made to give credit to the contributors even if all sources are not yet listed If you think you have found an area where credit is not given please contact the editor through the website Editor s Notes You won t get very far without noticing that this is a work in progress The guide has been written out of love for the game and the hope of helping others thereby bringing the IL 2 community closer together but the process of putting it together has occurred over an extended period during free time and it has not been through a rigorous editing process There are bound to be inconsistencies errors and omissions All that is asked of you beyond your understanding is that you not turn a blind eye Submit suspected mistakes besides areas where the work is blatantly incomplete by dropping an email at the official site You might even consider sharing some of your knowledge by contributing The document was prepared with the BIFX 2 system an
21. can choose to do things your way that is reassign the keys and joystick buttons to your heart s content From the main screen click on Controls then choose the right hand column of the appropriate entry A tap of the new key or joystick button assignment will register the new command assignment Be very care ful though assigning a key or joystick button that is already assigned somewhere else will remove the original assignment without a noti fication and there is no way to automatically cancel the reassignment Even if you realize too late that a reassignment occurred to get it back you either have to know what the original assignment was or reset all of the default settings and start all new assignments from scratch You can also make one or two assignments to the same control func tion or leave it unassigned Leaving it unassigned can be useful if you really intend never to use it so that you never accidentally engage that function Making two assignments for the same function can be useful in that you can backup joystick buttons from the keyboard A word to the wise decide on your system of special control assign ments as you learn your own needs and know it well but be careful not to make more work for yourself than you save Each pilot that you cre ate can have his own set of customized commands and indeed each time 1Some reduced price versions do not come with printed material only the CDROM The original assignm
22. guns needed to be treated with a great deal of respect The preferable exit method is often to stay low and to get out as fast as you possibly can You should plan your exit before you start your attack run Look for villages forests or high ground that you can duck behind to screen you from any anti aircraft fire Without this extra cover you will be vulnerable to fire regardless of how low you fly Do not stay on a continuous course you should jink to throw off the AA The artificial intelligence is very accurate but unimaginative for instance it will not anticipate your evasive maneuvers or learn from your tactics as human AA gunners might Keep your evasive maneuvers small to maintain your speed Small balanced turns and or skids will usually keep you out of AA sights At the end of the day though if there is no significant cover to use around the target escape is something of a lottery When you are so low your chances of bailing out successfully are minimal to zero Use your speed to zoom climb before bailing if you think you are critically hit and cannot escape or successfully crash land An alternative to the low exit is to climb hard following an attack This was a commonly used tactic in the second World War Low level fly ing is inherently dangerous and regaining height quickly lessens your vulnerability to enemy aircraft In the real world putting vertical and horizontal distance between you and the anti aircraft guns also makes
23. landing gear cowl flaps fuel selection valves propeller mixture and throttle settings then go through a precise engine startup and warm up procedure and observe that everything reacts properly That is just the pre flight checklist There is detailed documentation out there for your airplane but no in game lists You may wish to make some simplified checklists of your own Some things that you do want to learn to do before taking off are allowing the engine to warm up somewhat checking control surfaces to make sure your controllers are connected properly setting your view applying brakes before increasing throttle making sure that nothing is obstruct ing your path and deploying the flaps to the desired setting 45 Taxiing Way up in the sky airplanes are elegant and doing what they do best On the ground they are clumsy at best and have poor forward views Taxiing is performed at low speeds not much faster than you can walk The faster you taxi the faster your airplane will become unstable Keep in mind the quotation at the beginning of this chapter To get the airplane to maneuver on the ground you must use the thrust provided by the engine to go forward The propwash also flows over your rudder so you can use it to steer Before you start moving though a further word on steering The rudder is the only primary control surface used to maneuver on the ground you can keep your hands off the stick until you are ready for take
24. lost in thoughts about IL 2 sure and yr wife shouts sud denly you are flying again aren t you Jurinko e you get nervous when you hear the song Yakkity Yak STRIDER_EB 04 03 03 e your passenger airliner makes some hair raising corrections at landing and you love every minute of it Spiffae 04 03 03 12 4 Squadrons CHAPTER 12 Acknowledgements There are a fair number of people who have stepped forward to offer their help with this project There is a organizational list of potential and actual contributors exists on the Eastern Skies Sadly the hur ried preparation of this document for a public evaluation has so far pre vented it from being re assembled A smaller group all from the Ubi forums than have offered help have been able to bring significant con tributions Most significantly mikeyg007 wrote section 8 1 on ground attack and did a lot of encouraging Tully_ effte and Loco S all three willingly provided their considerable knowledge of aviation and IL 2 in an effort to evaluate correct and add to the project All three of these have offered good advice encouraging correspondence and material to add to the book and website Loco S in particular has contributed large amounts of downloadables some of which is still waiting on confirma tion of copyright non infringement Recently he has also sent a lot of additions to the chapter Ground school These are still being reviewed Ham who made a
25. no longer only pointing only vertically and counteracting gravity it also now has a horizontal component as well This horizontal component of the lift brings the airplane out of a straight flight path by pushing the airplane to the side in the direction of the horizontal component of lift as depicted in figure 19 Now the aircraft is headed both straight ahead and to the left This motion of the airplane being pushed pulled to the side is called slip As the airplane starts moving to the side slipping the vertical stabilizer receives its own angle of attack so that there is a force acting on it This force causes the airplane to yaw into a new equilibrium I am still confused on the yaw and slip in an uncoordinated vs coordinated turn in which the airplane has a continually changing direction in the horizontal plane The airplane will move along the path of a circle You can visualize this process with the moving figures provided at 8 So what control inputs are needed if any in all of this As it turns In a real airplane you need very little aileron input to hold the bank angle In IL 2 you have to hold aileron input to maintain a bank This is a known issue in the flight model 47 48 Flight out if you only use the ailerons to bank the plane the plane will turn as described but it will not point in the direction it is going In other words the plane will slip while in the turn In a real airplane you can feel this b
26. pictures at high frame rates of a warpy slide show if the CPU isn t up to the task 96 Technical hints This compromise between the level of detail of the flight model and the computer s ability to keep up accounts for a lot of the difference between sims It also explains why 1C Maddox chose to simplify the flight model for the AI Making it simpler allows more Al aircraft to be put in the mission without slowing down the computer too much A third source of differences comes from the quality of the program mers historical sources A properly conducted flight test series is more that just the combat envelop graph and list of a dozen or so speed and climb figures Full test reports can run to hundreds of pages more than half of which are tables of figures Developing formulae to model the physics in sufficient detail to achieve results that match the perfor mance tests in every details is extremely demanding on a computer Full military simulators use all the computing power of a very powerful computer often multiprocessor to model just one plane We are quite unreasonably hoping that Oleg can perform the same level of detail on machines that run many times slower and for many planes at once Compromises have to be made and accepted If the aim were to simply have a plane that flew like the real thing with no scenery gunnery or other planes you would find that many of the compromises would be less obvious or not necessary at all but w
27. repeater compass for navigation When you plan to be flying a particular aircraft very much it is definitely worthwhile to learn what instruments are available to you and to have their placement memorized Stuff happens fast up there and this greatly aids your ability to gather vital information at a glance In most aircraft the controls for the gear flaps and radiator coolant cowling flaps etc are not animated Several aircraft do have warning lights that indicate the position of landing gear and in some aircraft such as the IL 2 there are manual indicators The next thing to learn to adjust to life in the cockpit is how to use the OWI indicator see section 4 1 The point of view rotates around an point in the cockpit meant to represent the position of the pilot s eyes The mouse can be used to rotate the view smoothly and the mouse speed can be altered From the main menu click Hardware Setup and then Input and enter a number into the Mouse Sensitivity field You can also use the hat button of a joystick to snap or pan between various viewing angles pressing F9 toggles between snap and pan modes You may also choose to have a look around the outside of the aircraft by pressing F2 See section 6 4 for more on changing views As you climb into the various cockpits you will notice that the visibil ity varies greatly from aircraft to aircraft In some planes the forward visibility is fairly obscured in others great Often armor plati
28. s right there is a certain angle of attack beyond which increasing that angle will no longer longer result in an increase of lift Itis at this critical angle of attack that the airflow over the wings breaks loose separating from the wing turbulence instead of laminar flow and a stall incurs 7 Note that well Stall is a function of angle of attack and not of airspeed Airspeed does play a role since you can continue to fly in a stall at angles of attack greater than the critical angle but you cannot continue to fly at airspeeds lower than the stall speed Anyway since beyond this critical angle of attack no additional lift is available to restore the verti cal equilibrium the force of gravity will begin to accelerate the airplane toward the earth and control of the airplane can even be lost Sound scary It can be and at any rate it s definitely not something you want 2Although this becomes nearly impossible for mere mortals 5 2 Energy to do in a combat situation Yet another aviation proverb goes as follows If you want to go up pull back on the yoke If you want to go down pull back a little more If you want to go down real fast and spin around and around and around just keep pulling back 4 Now in a fighter with enough speed you might do just this under certain circumstances but without the part about falling fast and spinning The point here is if you keep increas ing the angle of attack to the p
29. set in the difficulty options These are wind and turbulence flutter effect stalls and spins blackouts and redouts engine overheat torque and gyro effects realistic landings takeoff and landing head shake realistic gunnery limited ammo limited fuel and vulnerability The rest of the settings cockpit always on no external views no pad lock no icons and no map icons also have to do with realism but are concerned with viewing and have little or nothing to do with the flight model Some of the absolute introductory basics of flight namely the forces acting on an aircraft its axes of movement and the principle effects of manipulating the primary control surfaces the ailerons elevator and rudder are covered in the IL 2 User Manual 3 If after reading this manual you are thirsty for more knowledge about how airplanes fly and not too sure where to look the informative and not infrequently en tertaining book See How It Flies 4 is a great place to start It is an online book and as its author describes it is a book about the per ceptions procedures and principles of flight We will certainly repeat some things about the basics later on but first let s have a seat in the office where business will be taken care of 4 1 Gauges and levers and toggles oh my I remember how I was always impressed when I looked at the instru ment panels in cockpits of all kinds I still am I have little idea of half the flips and i
30. the IL 2 The AI in 112 will sometime use this technique so if you are following an Al flight leader watch out for your flight moving into line astern formation Then sim ply follow the plane ahead of you As each plane approaches the target it puts its nose down into dive of perhaps 45 degrees and attacks with 8 2 Tactics whatever weapons are available rockets bombs or guns The plane then climbs back into the circle This attack is typically maintained until ammunition is exhausted The carousel is designed to keep the enemy under continuous attack though the advantage of this in terms of shattering morale and suppressing enemy movement and effective ness is less meaningful against Al targets It does however have some use in dividing flak as flak is forced to choose between three targets one running up to the dive one diving and one climbing in its exit 8 1 6 Summary In order to be successful in ground attack in IL 2 you need considerable practice an awareness of the particular characteristics of each plane and sustained concentration in all phases of the attack If you invest this effort you will be rewarded with the satisfaction of destroyed tar gets on most of your ground attack missions Good luck and remember the most important factor in any mission is not the number of kills ob tained but getting home in one piece 8 2 Tactics Wouldn t you just know that one the most important sections is not yet written If
31. the landing area There are several different kinds of approaches For now we are only going to concern ourselves with a straight in approach to a landing strip In this approach you are go ing to establish what is called a glide slope and maintain this glide almost until you are on the ground The most difficult aspect of this kind of approach and perhaps of any standard landing procedure at all is judging where you are relative to the intended glide slope High command has deemed that smoking craters are in no short supply so this section on landing has top priority to be finished 5 9 Take her for a spin Actually don t Spins develop at least one wing is in a stall and because of horizontal rotation the two wings are at different angles of attack 4 The aircraft is in a rotational motion that is very stable due to the cen trifugal force Think of a falling whirlybird They re very dangerous so don t mess with them 10A samara as of the elm and maple It s a leaf that has a wing with a seed at one end 4 49 50 Flight 5 9 1 Preventing spins How far you can push an aircraft before it stalls and snaps into a spin really depends on the aircraft s flight characteristics Some such as the IL 2 are impossible to spin Others require a fair amount of care The P 39 with its mid engine placement is a notorious example The key to preventing a spin is to prevent a stall since a spin starts out with a stall The ea
32. trim tabs in figure 4 7 2 Moving these tabs in one direction will cause a force that moves the primary control surface in the other direction The most important of these secondary control surfaces is easily the elevator trim tab because it helps determine the angle of attack The trim mecha nisms for rudder and ailerons work in a similar way so let s consider how elevator trim works and the major whens and hows of applying it Figure 4 7 2 depicts an elevator airfoil seen from the side On the rear upper surface you can see that a part on the trailing edge of the airfoil has been hinged or bent upwards In fact the bent part of the airfoil is not all along the edge but only a fraction of the width of the edge like the tab you can see on the rudder The result of this tab being hinged upwards and held in place is the deflection of some of the incoming air upwards creating a downward force on the elevator airfoil This force pushes the elevator down not shown in the figure In fact this is very similar to our earlier description of the way the stick and elevator work together The difference now is that the tab is located on 4 7 Secondary control surfaces Figure 4 3 The effect of moving a surface on the elevator airfoil upward is a downward force on the airfoil the elevator so if the tab is moved upwards the resulting air pressure pushes the elevator down The result of this is the same as if we had pushed for
33. very solid reputation among sims Chances are that you already know most of that What you want is to get on your way to winging through virtual but beautiful eastern skies confidently anticipating the appearance of any who would oppose you That is one of the aims of this guide getting you started be it with overcoming technical troubles learning about the strengths and weaknesses of the various aircraft learning how to fly properly combat Introduction tactics finding resources online or even other topics We ve really tried to cover just about everything What this guide cannot claim to be is official It is not the final word on any of these topics it really is nothing more than the compilation of experience and carefully considered opin ions You might also learn some things here that go beyond IL 2 itself but you ll just have to read on and see The purpose of this book then is not just to get rid of newbies effi ciently and prevent some bad habits Yes we want to turn you into a knowledgeable virtual combat pilot and we want you to enjoy it You ll find however that the contents of this guide don t delve very deeply into any of the issues it addresses There s so much more to discover and you will soon find yourself developing your own style and tastes often in contrast to what you find here and doing your own research So much the better The next chapter for which writers are badly needed is planned to give you
34. 2 1 Speed 7 2 2 Altitude 7 2 3 The plane Wing loading weight distribution loadout and other issues not an overly deep discussion though 66 Combat maneuvers 7 2 4 Corner speed 7 2 5 Use of secondary control surfaces 7 3 Basic maneuvers 7 3 1 Break 7 3 2 Aileron Roll 7 3 3 Barrel roll 7 3 4 Chandelles and the combat turn 7 3 5 Yo yos 7 3 6 Loops 7 4 Advanced maneuvers 7 4 1 Scissors The scissors is a purely defensive move It s not easy and requires a lot of information about relative position to the attacker and a good visualization of the situation There is an excellent article written by you re not going to believe this Andy Bush 16 You ll definitely want to check that article out to get all of that sound advice 7 4 2 Hammerhead Slightly different from a wingover how 7 4 3 Spiral climb The difficulty is in learning the timing 7 4 4 Snap roll CHAPTER 8 Ground pounding and fighter tactics 8 1 Ground attack Ground attack is the pinpoint attack of targets on the battlefield In principle any aeroplane carrying a weapon load can be used for ground attack In the First World War fighter pilots soon realized their ground attack potential They adapted their fighters by adding a small bomb load supplementing their machine guns for the attack of enemy troops artillery trenches and transport columns The idea was successful and the fighter bomber was extensively used in the
35. I am reminded time and again that it is not So many eager folks come to the IL 2 forums wanting to learn the tricks that will help them win in IL 2 or want to learn why they can t land a bul let and always end up a dirt torpedo The answers offered to specific questions vary in usefulness as well as temperament but they usually have a common theme learn the basics practice try this or that then practice it read this or that article practice All I can say is that it s pretty sound advice There is a lot to learn but you don t have to learn everything at once We hope to provide a good beginning here An intro duction to the basics for flying in IL 2 is here and the practicing is up to you Fortunately for you this is a user s guide and not formal flight train ing You won t have to spend countless hours studying and learning before you even get up in the air Our goal is to get you started discov ering and improving your flight sim experience not to prep you for your private license Although learning to fly in IL 2 won t make you able to 16 Ground school fly a real airplane it is realistic enough to demand some knowledge on your part Most of us don t have real airplanes but we would like to learn from the outset in the most realistically simulated environment we can Hence in the discussions of this and the following chapter we are going to assume that the realism settings having to do with the flight model are all
36. Note This initial version of the document is full of incom plete sections oversights omitted credit incomplete sentences etc It has been placed online for peer review and because it has been deemed useful to some degree as is It is kindly requested that you do not redistribute this document to others but provide them with a link to the homepage You will find this link on the title page This will help prevent confusion with forthcoming ver sions and give me a chance to correct some of the major errors in upcoming weeks Please consider this work in its current stage as something analogous to the alpha release of a software package Peer reviews are appreciated Thanks very much Mike July 11 2003 Copyright 2003 Y A User s Guide to IL 2 Sturmovik hosted at Eastern Skies http people ee ethz ch chapman il2guide Version 0 1 July 11 2003 This work is dedicated to all the men and women who served their coun tries and fellow man on land sea and in the air in the Great Patriotic War the Second World War Preface You probably do not want to sit down and read this guide from the be ginning Itis a fairly long read although some of the material and especially the instructive material is meant to be read progressively Other parts might be browsed through and read selectively It is up to you the reader to know which parts you believe you will find useful and which parts not Feel free to skip around
37. You will certainly not want to read all of this info at once However do not underestimate the usefulness of this resource New users won t under stand the value at first but you may well find yourself going there time and again There is an entire book s worth of carefully researched infor mation there It is true that you won t find every specification or other piece of information your heart may desire and there are complaints that some of the basic performance information is missing It is what it is you can take issues up with the creators of the game As it stands they ve provided a wealth of information You can find similar informa tion for the aircraft at the official website 10 4 Credits This section is pretty self explanatory If you integrate yourself into the online IL 2 community you might start to recognize some of the names mentioned here 10 5 Hardware setup 10 5 1 Video modes These settings are directly related to your hardware specifically the graphics card and monitor They affect the quality of graphical ren dering by telling the hardware how to use its resources The ability to change these settings in this menu is merely a convenience because the settings you can change here are the same as several of the options available in i12setup exe Since you can alter some but not all of the 10 5 Hardware setup settings here il2setup exe gives you the full overview or at least the fullest graphical interfac
38. ack with the stick until you get the angle you want and then relieve the pressure needed on the stick with trim input Initiate surface control changes with the stick or rudder ped als then trim to relieve the pressure Note that stick forces are modeled in IL 2 The force on the elevator caused by trim will hold the elevator in place and the virtual stick not your joystick will stay in its new position This becomes important in later discussions because trim can be used to overcome the stick forces that limit the effect of your joystick input 33 It has been hinted at that not all aircraft have trim on all surfaces Some planes do More accurately their trim is not pilot adjustable but historically was not have trim for performed by the ground crew before flight German fighters specific All surfaces 34 Ground school ally the Bf 109 and FW 190 series have elevator trim only no rudder or aileron trim Your right leg will become larger than your left after all those long missions holding right rudder The Polikarpov 1 16 and some others have no trim on any of their control surfaces 4 7 3 Flaps In the early days of aviation aircraft developers needed a way to stabi lize aircraft at low speeds as it was common for them to go into a spin A slot system was developed by Handley Page and this led to the de velopment of flaps on the wings which when extended provided extra lift and increased drag to allow a lower la
39. advanced and automated than oth ers and they may or may not seem to make sense That s how cockpits are though and the 3 D cockpits in IL 2 are modeled to a high degree of detail and accuracy even if every last thing you see is not animated The P 39N 1 cockpit for example has over 60 items modeled and these compare closely in placement and detail to the documentation in actual pilot s handbooks If you would like to find out more about the various items in the cockpit you can find cockpit reference guides for a few of the planes at 5 In each cockpit the most important thing is what you find first after climbing into the cockpit the instrument panel You should be able to identify a number of items fairly quickly The most important and fre quently needed gauges are usually large and placed near the center of your view Some indicators that you will recognize from the previous section that are usually highly perceptible are the airspeed indicator altimeter artificial horizon turn and bank indicator and variometer climb indicator Get into your favorite cockpit and take a moment to look around and find these instruments by comparing them to the images on your reference card Keep in mind that not all aircraft has 4 2 Cockpit orientation every gauge although you should always find an airspeed indicator and an altimeter The manifold pressure and tachometer are especially important for engine settings Look for a whiskey compass or
40. an ego I say that if someone tells the community that they are a cheat than we should take them at their word and label them as such All of the cheaters eventually tell people that they are cheaters and when they do we should take them at their word I m not going to post any names here but all of us who have been around for a while know who they are Knowing what to look for only makes it easier to see when someone is doing it Anyway I digress The point is that lag does matter but not in the ways that most pilots think that it does As long as it s stable it s not that big an issue but it does make it easier to hit targets and harder to evade targets thanks to the way plane positions and hits are done And of course it makes it easier to cheat 11 6 Useful external hardware 101 11 6 Useful external hardware Joystick throttles rudder pedals TrackIR 11 7 Further help This chapter may have helped to clear some things up for you but chances are it hasn t you still have some great unsolvable problems to solve Competent help is not far off After you have tried to under stand the problem and gathered information about it head on over to the Technical Support forum at the Ubi forums which is described in the first section of the next chapter section 12 1 CHAPTER 12 The L 2 community 12 1 The official forums Some serious comments about what can be expected to be found at the UbiSoft forums These forums are a
41. are flyable This makes for a total of over 80 aircraft and for 50 of these you can climb into the cockpit You can find out a lot of in depth information on these aircraft at the aircraft section of the official site from which some of this material has been taken as well as in the in game Object Viewer The goal of this chapter however is not to repeat available information but to provide you with informa tion based on other users experience with and in game research on the planes This includes a general overview of the basic purposes of each aircraft type what special characteristics they have how they might be dangerous what their weak points are and tips on handling and spe cific tactics For an example of how such information is being gathered have a look at this thread in the General Discussion at the Ubi forums There is quite a large amount of information to fill in this chapter It is being actively worked on but it takes time to gather the voices of experience together Both Axis and Allied aircraft are divided into three sections Fight Machines of war ers are designed with the purpose of shooting down enemy aircraft Ground attack aircraft consist of both dive and level bombers Aircraft dedicated to transport and reconnaissance are grouped together Of course some fighters can move mud and even dedicated ground attack aircraft can be used as fighters in a pinch A large number of the aircraft types are unavailable
42. ary control surfaces Alright already can we get into the air now You poor little newbie pilot It s good that you re so eager However we ve put off discussing take off until section 5 4 for good reason There is still some critical stuff to absorb Before you actually take off you have to realize that often you can t do everything with the stick rudder pedals and throttle In fact often these controls alone will not be enough to even get your plane off the ground Besides that you re going to have to maintain steady flight without wearing your arms out To help where we otherwise couldn t help ourselves we have secondary flight surfaces How are they differ ent from the primary ones then 4 7 1 The effect of primary flight control surfaces The ailerons elevator and rudder are the first things you hear about when learning how to control an airplane What they actually do is to create drag and or change lift to shift the equilibrium of the aircraft thereby creating forces that change the way it moves through the air Just to make sure we know the effects of deflecting these surfaces let s go over them quickly Let s consider the ailerons first When in level flight you move the stick left you expect the plane to bank to the left and it does but why The aileron on the left wing has been deflected upwards and the aileron on the right wing has been deflected downwards As a result the left wing loses some lift and is also deflected
43. at something has to be done with the information gathered What has to happen between observing and acting on the information gathered After his experience in the Korean War Col John Boyd developed a now famous theory involving a continual process he named the OODA time cycle or loop observe yourself and the physical environment orient yourself by making a mental image of the situation decide based on all factors present in the orientation act on your decision without hesitating You are going through this time cycle which is also referred to as the Boyd cycle all the time whether you know it or not All combat is time sensitive and as described by Col Boyd whoever can process this cycle more quickly than the opponent or stay inside the enemy s OODA loop will have a huge advantage and should emerge victorious If you can process that loop faster the enemy s observations and orientation will be slower and thus his decisions and actions will be increasingly inef fective as you get further inside his loop keeping him on the defensive Keeping a good OODA cycle is the foundation of situational awareness and because situational awareness is so critical to success in aerial com bat you would do well to study this concept further 12 13 14 Since the key to success lies in your OODA loop being faster than the enemy s you will want to train yourself to accurately and efficiently ob serve instantly orient yourself to the new infor
44. ayers do That pro gram has been out for a long time and Pm sure that it works with FB just as well as it worked with IL2 There was a flag in IL2 that would set a lag limit that made the lag warp program less effective but even then people could still use it as long as they didn t exceed the tolerance the server set If the server did some of the math to determine where planes were then lag warp weapons wouldn t work because the server would know basically within a bubble where a plane COULD be and if someone tried to update their location and the server saw that they were trying to go outside that bubble then the server would know it and could boot them IL2 did that to a certain degree hence the cheat ing detected message but IL2 seemed to do it based on lag rather than by making some kind of bubble around a plane s position representing where it is possible for that plane to be when it update s it s location I don t know how FB does it if it does it at all when you tell Oleg not to announce cheat you are discouraging him from building anti cheat mechanisms into his code and a lot of people have done that The downside of using the server for this stuff is that the algorithms involved would be really complex and would be a big drain on the server So by letting the player computer control position and hits relatively unchecked you increase performance but you also make it easier to cheat Pick you
45. ciably changed man for lack of a better name let s call him Oleg is cruising along on a frosty winter afternoon in a 41 LaGG 3 at about 310kph Oleg s fighter is in a state of equilibrium meaning that all forces are in bal ance and if you look carefully you ll see that as it moves forward the wing is meeting the air at a certain angle called the angle of attack This angle of attack is so important to understand because it affects so many things A good definition is the angle at which the air hits the wing 4 Simple enough but let s make sure we understand that How does one figure out what the angle of attack is There are three things that determine it which we are getting to An angle is measured between two lines and for our purposes our two lines are the chord line and a line representing the direction of the relative wind Picture the chord line as being the line between the lead The only instrument in the Wright brother s first plane measured angle of attack 4 4 6 Attack ing edge of the wing and the trailing edge of the wing look closely at fig ure 6 where in both pictures the chord line is represented by an orange line The chord line doesn t change relative to the aircraft unless you change the shape of the wing A notable example is when you change flap positions see section 4 7 The direction of the wind relative to the aircraft changes often The relative wind has less to do with wind relat
46. climb to the new altitude e You can pull back on the stick and hold it there In the described situation you are in cruise and have enough airspeed to trade some of it for altitude This is called a zoom climb So you pull back on the stick until you have climbed 300m but now realize that your airspeed is pretty low You will have to throttle up to get back to the desired airspeed If you don t your airplane is unlikely to maintain the new altitude e You can open the throttle up As we found out in section 4 6 the plane will start to climb without increasing its airspeed very much Once you have the new altitude you can reduce throttle and re sume level flight Don t think you won t have to touch your control stick though Together with load factor which includes bombs ammunition and fuel and more significantly the positive G force during turning maneuvers However for our present discussion we will not concern ourselves with load factor 41 42 Flight Which is better In this example situation the first possibility seems to be an awful lot of hassle And what if you had had to climb to an even higher altitude It s pretty clear that you need more throttle to climb Had you already been flying with full power and needed to gain altitude then the first option that of pulling back the stick would be the only one open to you However under normal flight conditions you need to increase your power setting to gain altitude You
47. ctors that influence your type of landing as well such as bullets flak and collisions but we ll worry about those in the next chapter Another important phenomenon that probably causes more virtual deaths than enemy fire and is directly related to stalling is the spin and is covered in section 5 9 Right now it s important to understand what a stall is so that we can know how to stay in the air It will prove very useful in later discussions about takeoff landing and combat maneuvers Editor s note This paragraph needs to be re examined as it has been reported as having errors In other words don t expect to be able to be lieve what you read here Let s bring back our picture of level flight in the section about angle of attack If for whatever reason the vertical forces keeping your airplane in this equilibrium change it will respond to that change all by itself by changing its angle of attack which up to a certain point will change the lift on the wing Let s illustrate gravity is acting on the airplane with a downward force and the wings are pro ducing the force of lift to counteract that force of gravity so that the air plane does not fall Now let us suppose that the airplane suddenly gets heavier or even better that it suddenly loses some of its lift Without any help from the pilot the angle of attack will increase produce more lift and restore the vertical equilibrium Earlier we said this works up to a certain point That
48. d it was used to embed hyperlinks directly into the PDF You should be able to click them to navigate about the document and many links take you directly to a linked website through your browser if this feature is sup ported on your computer This is meant to be a feature and not a bug but hasn t been well tested In particular the original method of online citation which involved linking to URLs in the bibliography persists in several places as time has not yet permitted to update Note that in addition to a linked table of contents in AdobeB Acrobat Reader the bookmark feature allows you to always have a window frame open for easy navigation The current page format is A4 the European standard for normal printing although the page layout is conservative and can be printed on Letter format The headers and margins are also double sided for printing which is why some pages are left blank In future versions the document should be made available in various formats including both A4 and letter format for both double and single sided layouts plus an e book version Another planned feature is the implementation of tracks for the demonstration of principles and techniques throughout relevant sec tions This can become extremely time consuming for a single person and readers and of course experienced pilots are enthusiastically re quested to submit tracks to this purpose The inclusion of graphics makes the document far m
49. d the enemy Relative altitude and speed of nearby friendly and enemy aircraft and the location of other objects such as clouds with respect to your airplane Types of both enemy and friendly aircraft and the skill and state of mind of the pilots Strengths and weaknesses of enemy aircraft relative to your own Location of friendly and hostile surface units The location and heading of your aircraft position relative to en emy lines and land features that may be of help or hindrance Amount of fuel left and how much required to return Whether the mission parameters have been fulfilled It is a common mistake among those who innocently set themselves in the virtual combat cockpit to only consider a couple of these critical data and almost certainly not at once It is natural to concentrate pri marily on the relative position of the enemy aircraft and be preoccupied with worry about whose guns are pointing at who The beginner might consider altitude at the beginning of the engagement or airspeed when It is left to you to consider which may or may not be relevant in IL 2 and to your particular mission 6 3 Detection and closing there are no enemies close by to shoot at and when a desperate getaway is in order With time you will learn to consider and process a lot of information at once because it has become built in routine However observation is only the first step on the road to victory We have already mentioned th
50. ddition to its acceleration and speed it has a high turn rate at low to medium altitudes it is faster than the 109G s and 190A s and out turns them both in horizontal and vertical maneuvers La 7 The La 7 is the big brother of the La 5FN faster more powerful and in all ways downright scary Introduced in 1944 refinements to the design made the La 7 one of the best front line fighters at the end of the war and it enjoyed superiority to nearly every propeller driven fighter Available in IL 2 as Al only it is flyable in Forgotten Battles MiG 3 The MiG 3 is a high altitude interceptor and the fastest of such in 1941 Unfortunately it is weakly armored and catches fire easily when hit At low altitudes it turns slowly and has poor maneuverabil ity Many consider it a specialist s plane It is often underestimated but dangerous and a stable gun platform in its element and responds well at high angles of attack With 2x 7 62 mm and 1x12 7 mm machine guns the armament is not strong 10 Machines of war P 39 Also known as the Airacobra Cobra Snake and sometimes the Iron Dog the P 39 is one of the more powerful fighters in the Soviet arsenal This American designed and constructed aircraft was provided to the Soviets in large numbers as part of the lend lease program start ing in 1942 This plane is built around its armament and with 50 and 30 caliber 12 7 and 7 92mm machine guns and a 37mm cannon fir ing 3 shells per second t
51. downwards whereas the right wing gains lift and is deflected upwards The flipper or elevator is controlled by pushing or pulling on the stick When you pull on the stick these surfaces are deflected upwards The airstream over them is deflected upwards resulting in a new down ward force on the tail of the plane This force also causes the nose to pitch up changing the angle of attack If the right rudder pedal is pushed forward the left one will move back the rudder will pivot outward to the right hand side of the plane The airstream will be deflected towards the right and create a force pushing the the tail in the other direction a clockwise direction looking from the top view of the plane This force causes the tail to swing yaw in that direction the pilot might think to the left and the nose will yaw to the right There are variations in the designs of primary control surfaces but 29 Ground school Figure 4 2 The IL 2 models have particularly interesting looking trim tabs marked in red The hydraulic tab operating systems are nicely animated for our purposes this is what we need to know As it turns out in most planes you can control these surfaces with other means than the stick and pedals There are also very good reasons for doing so 4 7 2 Trim On the primary control surfaces of most planes there are secondary con trol surfaces called trim tabs You can see an example of the
52. e If your target is moving this means that you will have to aim for a point well in front of your target As an example suppose you are flying at 10 meters above the ground rooftop height with an airspeed of 300 kph or 83 m s Your bombs will take approximately one second to reach the ground You should there fore release them when you are 83 meters from your desired impact point that annoying tank that just sniped your front lines At such a low height you can actually lob the bomb into the side of large targets such as ships and aircraft hangars Use the track record facility to re view your accuracy and learn the correct timing If you make your bomb runs at a standard speed this training will be even more profitable Dive bombing The time of bomb release is critical to level bombing accuracy However if you dive in your attack the criticality of timing is reduced and this is the idea behind the specially designed dive bomber types The ideal in dive bombing is a ninety degree i e vertical dive In this case as long as you are directly over the target and descending vertically downwards when you release your bombs the bomb cannot do anything else but fall directly onto it unless the wind has something to say about it It is desirable to delay bomb release as you will be able to line up more precisely on your target the closer you dive to it In classic dive bombing your dive should be between 75 90 The further off vertica
53. e also demand photo realistic scenery with both ground and air objects that behave something like realistically and register damage when we shoot at them Considering what we re asking of our humble desktops I think we re getting very good results Some of the graphical data is calculated by the CPU position and orientation of objects relative to the aircraft as a result of pilot input changing the aircraft position User settings like view distance allow the user to take some the load off the CPU Objects outside the chosen view distance only need to have distance calculated As long as the distance is greater than maximum view only that figure is needed For objects inside the view range distance angle orientation and apparent size all have to be calculated Obviously turning down setting like this drastically reduce the number calculation required of the CPU In this way the developers can build in some user scalable over engineering Another aspect of this shows up in tracks A lot of tracks ve down loaded didn t work right on my old PC a P3 500 Tm almost certain that this is because it couldn t keep up with the data handling and con sequently some of the recorded control inputs were skipped or applied late In a mission the same factor would mean a small un noticable to the pilot particularly at low fps delay in response to some control 11 4 System performance inputs while the CPU finishes what it was doing at the time
54. e or 1 Watt 1Joule second 5 3 Changing altitude and airspeed previous section Since you will change energy states at a given rate of time we can talk about the power involved This has already been emphasized in section 4 6 but it is important to realize that you have to work with the stick and throttle together to control your airspeed and rate of climb or descent The concepts of angle of attack energy and power come to our aid here To make controlled changes in altitude climb and descent you will have to watch your airspeed To make changes in your airspeed you will have to watch that you don t unintentionally change your altitude To climb optimally and the meaning of optimal depends on your goal you have to watch your airspeed closely which you will of course control with angle of attack and throttle setting Recall that you trim for angle of attack which determines airspeed We have gotten out of our minds now the concept that the stick is the up down control for the airplane This misconception is due to the fact that it seems to work in most conditions Let s now look at it more closely in a practical situation You are flying along en route to your mission at 2500 m and 280 kph when the change in waypoints for some reason only your CO understands calls for a change of heading and an altitude of 2800m After you have turned to the new heading you will need to climb What will you do There are a couple of ways you can
55. e rational discussions about it rather than arguments that look like religions discussions rather than logical debates In my case if I see someone who is scoring like 20 or 40 hits over a course of time when I know that the BEST online pilots are only around 10 the parser reporting section of the RAF74 IL2 FB Dynamic Campaign System tells me this then I know I should be suspicious Luckily P ve never seen this happen I ve seen players have high hit rates in individual missions but I ve also seen the same pilots have much lower hit rates in other missions And that is the problem How do you really know what is happening There IS a lag cheat program out there and there may well be a god gun program But though you can post that it s possible to make these programs you can t prove based on an individual case that someone is using them unless they tell you that they are But of course hackers like to tell everyone how clever they are and it seems that the less skilled they are the more important it is to them to make people think they are clever So over time we know who they are How many times for example have you seen individual pilots telling everyone how great the trim cheat was Do you think the same pilots would hesitate before using a lag cheat or a god gun No And they would brag to people within servers that they were doing it Nobody knows how clever they are unless they get caught Such is the beauty of the hum
56. e rudder in place manually with the rud der pedals or joystick twisting action Using rudder trim compensates for that ever present yaw see section 5 5 Aileron trim doesn t have much use in normal flight but can come in handy if a few holes get punched into one of your wings Applying aileron trim can help hold your plane level without you having to put in constant stick side pressure If you think this is annoying in IL 2 just imagine the force it required in a real plane The thing about trim is that it s really necessary and you need to be concerned about it all the time Every time you change power settings you need to think about adjusting your trim for angle of attack As your airspeed changes the forces on your rudder change and if you are fortunate enough to have it you need to readjust yaw with rudder trim Changes in load factor require retrimming such as after dropping external fuel tanks or a payload Even in cruise you have to trim to adjust for changes in the fuel load check this It is not necessary or practical to mention every instance here trim procedures will continue to surface in further discussions It is important to realize that the primary control surfaces and the secondary control surfaces work together Trim is an extension of stick or rudder input To make long term changes you should first use the primary controls Taking the example of elevator control again you should initiate a change in angle of att
57. e that comes with the game In order to avoid repeating the information these settings are not described here Re fer to section 11 1 instead for a detailed description of what all of the options under il2setup exe can do for you 10 5 2 Video options These settings are not available in il2setup exe and instead of telling the hardware what to do with its resources they tell the game what level of graphical quality should be sent to the hardware for rendering There are two modes of setting the picture quality simple and custom The simple mode gives no control over the individual setup items but makes sweeping changes with a single selection The custom mode per mits individual settings and is the more flexible and generally speak ing more useful mode Texture Quality Visibility Distance Objects Lighting Objects Detail Landscape Lighting Excellent may not be selected if XXX feature is not available from Landscape Detail Clouds Detail Clouds in IL 2 are marvelous but they do take a lot of resources If your system suffers in performance this is one setting you might consider turning back But oh those beautiful highly detailed clouds Clicking on Apply applies any changes you have made whereas clicking on Back without first clicking on Apply cancels any changes 87 88 IL 2 features and references 10 5 3 Sound setup 10 5 4 Input 10 5 5 Network 10 6 Tracks 10 7 Training 10 8 Quick Mission Builder QMB
58. ecause you will be pushed to one side of the cabin In IL 2 you will notice a head movement to one side in hard turns verify the amount of head movement in shallow but uncoordinated vs coordinated turns The way to avoid this is to coordinate the turn by input with the rudder By applying the right amount of rudder in the direction of the turn you will line up the aircraft fuselage with the direction of the turn As you move the ailerons to bank the plane apply rudder with the ailerons to coordinate the turn In IL 2 you don t need very much rudder input for this it is understated You can use the turn and slip indicator to judge how much rudder you need to coordinate the ball should stay in the middle If you are in a left hand turn and don t use rudder the ball will move to the left If you use some left rudder the ball will stay in the middle actually you need varying amounts of rudder during the transition but don t worry about that If you use too much rudder the ball will move to the right The rule of thumb is to step on the ball to keep it in the middle To coordinate a turn apply rudder in the direction of the turn step on the ball In fact we have been withholding information from you Remember that in the bank the lift component gets divided between the vertical and the horizontal If the lift was exactly enough to counter the air plane s weight in the turn and some of that lift is shifted to the horizon tal the
59. efinitely want to run the game in full screen mode When run ning in windowed mode the system still has to worry about rendering graphics for other elements outside the window eating up precious re sources If you don t see the video mode in the list that you would like to have don t worry you can set whatever you wantin conf ini See the next section Stencil buffer Video Settings 11 1 Game settings Texture quality Texture mipmap filter Texture compression Detailed land textures Use alpha Use index Polygon stipple Use dither Use clamped sprites Draw land by triangles Use vertex arrays Disable API extensions Extensions Multitexture Combine Secondary color Vertex array extension Clip hint Use palette 93 94 Technical hints Texture anisotropic extension Texture compress ARB extension Joystick There s not much to this one Here you can enable the use of your joy stick and by clicking on the Properties button open the Windows Gam ing Options dialog where you can calibrate your joystick and rudder pedals if you have them and you should If you don t have a joystick available yet get one as soon as you can It is a question of personal taste whether you want to get the cheapest joystick available a more reasonably performing joystick a force feed back stick or the latest HOTAS stick You can spend anywhere from 30 300 so suit yourself If you decide to try and control your
60. en written by Sotka and is hosted atthes TU RMOVIKTEC H N I K A website It is the general consensus that this is the definitive guide to the FMB If you start out using only the official notes from the IL 2 User Manual 3 you will be able to create missions but the interface is often counter intuitive and you will unnecessarily spend a lot of time to figure things out Questions not covered by Sotka s guide and these won t be basic can be asked at the Mission Builder Forum see section 12 1 10 13 Demo There was a lot of anticipation of IL 2 prior to its release A part ofthe evangelical efforts of the 1C Maddox team was the release of a demon strative version demo with a limited number of features that could be downloaded and installed for free with the goal of enticing the curious to purchase the game An updated version of the demo is still available to those unsure of whether they would like the game The download is about 150MB and links to locations where the demo can be downloaded are found on the official website 10 14 Patches Since its release in November 2001 a regular series of game updates were released the final one before Forgotten Battles being version 1 20v version 1 2 is nearly the same These so called patches make a great number of corrections including flight and damage model tweaks changes in sound the introduction of new aircraft etc A complete list is avail able on the official site This
61. ent is not deleted if the two assignments do not conflict such as Look Forward under snap view assignments and Center View under pan view assignments 10 2 Controls you create a new pilot he starts out with the set of default commands This could come as a shock if you don t discover it before the heat of battle Creating a new pilot simply means that you will have to make all of your changes again If you have very many customized settings at all it is advisable to create a list of them for yourself so that you can re implement the changes quickly You might consider creating a test pilot perhaps name him Test Control Settings and practice implementing any changes on him be fore you go messing with your own settings Before we move on here are some suggestions for useful reassign ments to make if you have a joystick with a throttle slider and a few buttons Prop Pitch 0 9 Keys 0 9 throttle settings not needed Weapon 1 4 Assigning to joystick buttons frees Enter Backspace Space keys Rudder Aileron Trim Arrow keys without Ctr1 key Look Forward Joystick button Center View Same joystick button as for Look Forward Elevator Trim Positive Joystick button of choice Elevator Trim Negative Joystick button of choice 10 2 1 HOTAS HOTAS stands for hands on throttle and stick These are the controls in IL 2 that you can control with a device that has smooth continu ous input generally referred to as a slider An e
62. experiment at different throttle set tings Set the throttle and settle into level flight or a steady rate of climb or descent then change the trim To understand these experiments more fully you should read sec tion 9 1 2 on phugoid oscillations There it is explained why the aircraft tends to change both airspeed and altitude in an alternating pattern The more dramatic your change in trim the stronger those oscillations will be Another good trim experiment is described in 4 If you want to make a temporary increase in angle of attack just raise the nose by applying a little back pressure on the yoke stick When you reach the new pitch attitude you can release most of the pressure and for the first few moments the airplane will maintain the new pitch attitude Then as it slows down you will need to maintain progressively more back pressure in order to maintain the new pitch attitude and new angle of attack After a few seconds things will stabilize at a new pitch attitude a new angle of attack and a new airspeed At this point if you release the back pressure the airplane will want to drop its nose so it can return to its trimmed angle of attack 4 7 Secondary control surfaces Rudder trim works the same way but for the yaw axis If you did the experiment in a fighter that has rudder trim you could have set a few clicks of right or left rudder trim depending on the direction of propeller rotation instead of holding th
63. future discussion for descriptions of the role it plays in turning and various combat maneuvers 45 46 Flight 5 6 Level flight Level flight is where you are flying straight ahead without gaining or losing altitude Achieving and maintaining perfectly level flight is one of the more difficult tasks to undertake even in a simulator where you don t have to deal with updrafts and where typically there is no turbu lence or wind at all The key of course is the proper setting of trim and throttle Set the trim to control angle of attack and thus airspeed and use the power throttle and propeller setting for rate of climb Once you have settled in you will have to keep movement about all three axes in equilibrium for more on settling in see again section 9 1 2 on phugoid oscillations If you have settled into level flight at a predetermined throttle and propeller setting usually measured by manifold pressure and rpm that are optimal for conserving fuel for a given altitude you are at cruise speed See section 9 3 for more details 5 7 Turning Getting the aircraft to turn is easy getting it to turn efficiently requires some thought It s the efficiency that s going to keep your six free of lead during combat Because of the freedom of movement of an airplane there are many ways to turn Combat maneuvers mostly consist of turn ing in a controlled and well timed manner relative to another aircraft or group of aircraft Specific turn
64. given direction This is especially the case in bombing intercept and ground attack missions Furthermore after the mission is over you will need to return to base often abbreviated as RTB All of this requires navigation skills There are various levels of navigation that can be engaged The most obvious and easiest which many people prefer to use is to engage the autopilot The autopilot will usually do a good job of carrying you in for mation along the waypoints at the specified airspeed If you are leading the formation your plane will follow the waypoints and your flight will follow you If you are a wingman your aircraft will follow the plane in front of you in formation If you are not interested in saving the track see section 10 6 then you can also speed up the time in flight to and from target by using time acceleration The and keys accelerate and decelerate time However the autopilot will also fight for you and make bad decisions so if you do use it consider disengaging it before you think you need to Be aware that when you disengage the autopi lot the controls suddenly relax and your plane may fall sharply out of formation 6 5 Navigation The autopilot also shows a tendency to be unreliable Many have experienced it flying you into the side of a hill or abruptly performing a nosedive into the ground If you are using it to save time that s one thing Have you tried flying manually at 8x If you are using it for
65. have to do Give it throttle build up speed use the rudder to keep yourself centered and once an acceptable ground speed is reached pull back on the stick a little to bring the plane into a gentle climb That s it Well almost It wouldn t do to have too short of a section on such an important and thrilling topic as takeoff now would it 5 4 1 The roll out Let s back up to where you were sitting on the runway and cleared to proceed Unless you need to get as much speed in as short a distance as possible say you are on a short strip or have a hill facing you you can release the brakes and start applying power Start the plane rolling by smoothly increasing the throttle At a certain engine power the plane starts to roll out and this is different for different aircraft Once rolling continue bringing the throttle control over several seconds to full throttle As you advance the throttle you will probably notice that your plane doesn t want to roll straight ahead The side to side yawing movement you ve come to learn is collectively called ground looping and is princi pally due to helical propwash and at the point where the plane s tail raises gyroscopic precession We won t study why this happens but smoothly advancing the throttle greatly helps to reduce ground looping However it will happen and the answer to this problem is the same as 6P factor is negligible even in taildraggers 44 Flight the answer to mo
66. he aim of this section is to help you wean yourself from the evils of autopilot and learn to fly 2Now that is an example of a lie All he really had in mind was selling more copies of his simulator 81 82 Advanced topics for yourself Those who are already such good pilots that they don t need to fly for themselves can skip this section Have you ever given much thought as to why planes would fly in for mations It wasn t just to admire the squadron s aircraft there are tac tical advantages to formation flying as discussed in part in section 8 3 1 on page 75 If you are offended by this comment you ought to learn to fly in formation If you winked at it instead chances are you can validly use autopilot to save time for your busy schedule you wimp CHAPTER 10 IL 2features and references This chapter is organized into sections based on the selection possibil ities of the main screen of IL 2 It goes beyond a simple description of the basic features to make some suggestions based on user experience There is also a section on the demo version which allows you to evaluate the game for free and one on patches or game updates that will help anyone who has just bought the game get up to speed on the current and last version of the sim 10 1 Pilot This screen allows you to create remove and select pilots from a regis ter When you create a new pilot you can give him or her a nickname The nickname of the selec
67. he key board Unfortunately you cannot start the engine with a simulation of the procedures it took to get those powerful engines revving There are all kinds of controls and checks before during and after starting and warming up the engine that are standard procedure This was often a difficult aspect for the ground crews on the Eastern Front during win ters Sometimes they would light fires under the fuselage to get the engine warm enough to turn over There is however one aspect that you as a virtual pilot have to con sider and that is when going online In an online coop mission dogfight server you should not touch the engine controls while the mission is loading nor for the first two seconds or so after it is loaded If you do this you risk randomly damaging your engine This is a known bug 4 4 Checklists 4 4 Checklists We all forget Checklists are there to help you prep your plane for flight and carry out simple maneuvers such as takeoff climbing cruising and landing under various conditions This is something the 1C Maddox team chose not to develop for their planes and given the amount of work required to make historically accurate checklists for the large number of aircraft the choice is understandable The reasoning is that the vast majority of flight simmers are not ready to give the time required to go through real checklists which are pretty detailed you have to check brakes electrical equipment control surfaces
68. hree models have a nearly identical cockpit layout PZL P l1c This delightful and highly maneuverable plane was hope lessly outmoded at the onset of the Blitzkrieg into Poland It neverthe less is hard to hit and not to be disregarded Yak The Yakovlev series of fighters is one of the most important used by the VVS A useful overview of these modern highly maneuverable and well armed fighters needs to be provided 3 2 Aircraft of the Luftwaffe 11 3 1 2 Ground attack aircraft IL 2 The Ilyushin 2 Sturmovik is an absolute joy to fly Armored like a tank it is lumbering but armed to the teeth and able to get air kills including unwary figthers It is very difficult to stall and will not spin Poor rear visibility is compensated in later models with a rear gunner There are a great variety of IL 2 types avaialable in the game the first second and third series the field modification the 2M first and later series types 3 and 3M the torpedo armed T type and the 21 There were 36 183 IL 2s built more than any other type of aircraft in history 2 Pe 2 Pe 3 Pe 8 The biggest bomber in the game Tu 2S 3 1 3 Transport and reconnaissance G 11 Li 2 MBR 2 AM 34 R 10 U 2VS 3 2 Aircraft of the Luftwaffe 3 2 1 Fighters Bf 109 E 4 Emil E 4 B Jabo E 7 B Emil E 7 Z Emil F 2 Friedrich F 4 Friedrich G 2 Gustav G 6 Gustav G 6 late Gustav G 6 AS Gustav
69. hrough the propeller hub there are 30 of these rounds she is well equipped to fight The 50 caliber guns can fire for 27 seconds continuously and the 30 caliber guns of the N 1 type can fire for 75 seconds so you need not spare them The placement of such a whopping cannon in a small fighter was made possible by placing the engine behind the pilot a rare design in its day This weight distribution and the leftover space up front made the implementation of tricycle gear desirable and the P 39s are the only planes in IL 2 with tricycle gear The engine placement also helps give the P 39 a nasty spin characteristic which requires a unique recovery procedure see section 5 9 You ll find she needs little rudder pressure when rolling into a turn In fact you always want to be fairly gentle on the controls As one P 39 training film puts it You want to treat this airplane like a lady don t try to be fast or rough if you expect to get along The Cobra has an extremely efficient airframe and as a result does not lose airspeed very quickly Use this to your advantage in combat Since the supercharger was not included in production this plane was not popular among USAF pilots of the high altitude Pacific theater en gagements Soviet pilots took advantage of its superb low altitude per formance and used it to great advantage as documented in 1 You can find a cockpit reference for the P 39 at the Sturmovik101 section of Mudmovers All t
70. in the unpatched release but all are available with patch release version 1 2 See sec tion 10 14 for information about patches 3 1 Aircraft of the Voyenno Vozdushnyye Sily 3 1 1 Fighters BI 1 The Berezniak Isaev rocket power combat aircraft was intended as ainexpensively constructed high speed interceptor to protect Moscow from German bombers It obviously enjoys a very high speed and excep tional rate of climb but its low fuel reserves limit flight time and it carries little ammunition It is also incapable of maneuvering horizon tally with propeller driven fighters Controls are simple landings are a challenge and a short campaign mode is provided 1 153 The Tchayka 1 16 The Polikarpov 1 16 Ishak Russian for Little Donkey was a mainstay of the VVS at the beginning of the war but as most VVS was outclassed by the modern Luftwaffe fighters when Operation Bar barossa began in 1941 However it is quite spry and although it can t keep up the German fighters high speed it can easily out turn them and is extremely dangerous up close The fighter served until 1942 when it was replaced by faster and more modern aircraft The I 16 although a monoplane is quite an old design dating to 1933 although the in game models are from 1939 It was the first Soviet fighter to have retractable undercarriage which had to be cranked by hand Volunteer Soviet pilots received combat experience in the I 16 while participating in
71. ing the order until the flak is subdued making the attack on the main target by yourself and any remaining wingmen more survivable If visibility is poor you choose to fly over the target area to pick out your targets for instance to distinguish armoured from soft skinned vehicles You can then use your high powered loadout rockets and bombs on the tougher targets leaving soft skinned vehicles to be mopped up by machine gun or cannon fire The weakness of this method is that AA will be alert and waiting when you re approach your target for your attack proper If flak is strong there is a strong case for making hard and accurate attack and then departing immediately If you adopt this prudent attitude a simultaneous attack maximises your survival chances It makes sense to bring the maximum ordnance to bear in the first pass by having all planes in your flight attack simultaneously A line abreast formation is ideal for this technique which suits a widely distributed target such as an airfield Another variation on simultane ous attack was the converging attack of torpedo bombers designed to trap an enemy ship in a converging circle of torpedoes and thus defeat its evading manoeuvres Sequential attack is in some circumstances your best bet A trans port column lends itself to a sequential attack by planes in a line astern formation But perhaps the most famous variation of sequential attack is the carousel or Circle of death used by
72. is another well recognized aircraft It is capable of both level and dive bombing 3 3 Armament and loadout 13 3 2 3 Transport and reconnaissance Ju 52 The Junkers 52 was the transport cow of the Luftwaffe and could carry 18 passengers which in wartime often translated to para troops Its role in the evacuation efforts at Stalingrad are legendary Slow and lumbering it requires a good escort but if caught unawares it has teeth in the form of defensive machine guns with a good field of fire There are both land and sea versions of this plane Fi 156 The Fiesler Storch is a famous reconnaissance aircraft Equipped with a rear machine gunner its disproportionately large wing surface allows it to fly at extremely low speeds and land in a short distance FW 189 A 2 Uhu Me 321 Glider transport Me 323 An enormous transport used to haul Me 321 gliders 3 3 Armament and loadout A great deal of information on armament and especially loadout is avail able on kajr s Sturmovik101 hosted by Mudmovers A summary of that information may be useful here but he s too busy at the moment CHAPTER 4 Ground school A small correction early is better than a large correction late Aviation proverb I ve given it some thought and have more or less come to the con clusion you can t be useful in the air much less good at aerial combat until you know how to fly an airplane I would have thought that this is obvious but
73. ium armor such as half tracks Your real headaches start when you have to face tanks Tanks are one of the most historically important ground targets in the Il 2 theater and one of the toughest nuts to crack in 112 Different armor strengths are accurately modeled for different makes of tank but in practice it is difficult to distinguish different kinds of tank from the air so you will probably employ the same gen eral technique Tanks can be distinguished from soft skinned tar gets by the considerable amount of dust that surrounds them an extra difficulty for the ground attack pilot They typically travel in groups of four in line astern When travelling cross country they will often adopt a diamond pattern when an enemy pilot ap proaches thus complicating your strafing pass In this case aim for either the leading or trailing tank Always attack tanks from behind where the armor is weakest Rockets and bombs are the weapons of choice against tanks You will have to hit the target dead on to get a kill 11 2 has an all or nothing damage model for ground targets You cannot disable a tank by for instance causing it to throw a track The ability of tanks to hit attacking planes with their main arma ment is disconcerting and generally acknowledged as unrealistic A single hit by a tank s main armament will either disintegrate your plane or cause you to instantly explode Either way you are not likely to survive Watch the turrets of
74. ive to the ground and every thing to do with the direction of air movement relative to the airplane It depends on both the direction of the movement of the airplane in the air and the movement of the air itself In IL 2 it s often the case that there is no wind so let s take the relative wind to be the same thing as the direction of motion of the airplane The relative wind is represented by a sky blue line in the figure and is considered to be the same thing as the direction of flight Now in the bottom part of the figure you can see that the LaGG s nose is pointed slightly up and Oleg and his aircraft are climbing The airplane is headed in the direction of the blue line even though it is pointed in the direction of the white line The orange line is still lined up with the chord line and the black line is level with the horizontal direction perpendicular to gravity All of these lines make up important angles that are going to help us figure out the angle of attack Climb Angle of attack Pitch attitude Incidence Incidence labeled as Inc in the figure is the angle between the direction the plane is pointing its longitudinal axis and the chord line Pitch is the angle between the axis direction the plane is pointing and the horizontal Climb is the angle between the direction of flight and the horizontal Angle of attack AoA is as before the angle that the wing is meeting the air that is the angle between the chord line and
75. l you are the more you will have to compensate for your dive angle Though you can use dive bombing techniques in any bomb equipped plane in IL 2 the Stuka is specially designed for it and we will discuss Stuka technique in some detail Dive bombing is however broadly the same in any plane You should begin your dive at least 1300 m above target level The higher you begin the longer you will have to adjust your line up on the target Ideally you will be directly over your target when you begin your dive Acquire your target through the window in the floor of your Stuka cockpit Let the target disappear past the rear of the floor window so that it is directly under you At this point roll onto your back cut the throttle apply the dive brakes and slowly and smoothly pull the nose down to line up on the target Practice this pro cedure with a bomb load until you can do it quickly and automatically The air brakes should give you plenty of time to line up so keep your 69 70 Ground pounding and fighter tactics adjustments in the dive small It is very easy to over correct First roll so that the target is directly ahead of you Then use small amounts of elevator so that you are aiming directly at the target As you get closer you can fine tune your aim by repeating this procedure In reality the Stuka had a sophisticated dive bombing sight but in IL 2 you have to use the gunsight as your reference point as was the case in fighters
76. le it DOES change so you would never really know how much you needed to lead In a nutshell you see the player shooting behind you because he is shooting at where you were on his computer when he fired rather than where you are on your computer when he fired And with a 400 MS lag time plus the other player s lag of say 100 MS he is firing at where you were on your computer roughly 500 MS earlier If two players BOTH have 400 MS lag times then the difference between them is a whopping 800 MS Lag makes it harder to evade other people rather than harder to hit them The reason is that you are seeing the same effect your enemy is seeing he appears to be 500 MS in our exaple from above behind where he is on his computer So your evasion is occuring 500 MS after whatever your opponent is doing 500 MS may not sound like much but consider that if he is close and shooting at you you will be taking hits before you see him shoot The only good thing about high lag is that it cuts both ways you get the same effect against your opponents that they get against you Another issue and I don t know if anyone has done this for IL2 FB but it was certainly done for RB3D is that you can make a god gun by recording the packets your computer sends when it scores a hit fig uring out what part of the packets says hit and then modifying the packets you send when you fire at other planes to say hit regardless of whether or not you
77. list also provides links to locations where the patches are available for download How to install the patches Why I should install the patches 89 CHAPTER 11 Technical hints You ve just bought the sim excitedly install it and start it up Oh man this is just gonna be so what the It doesn t work Smeared graphics Stutter Three frames per second What kind of stupid game is this Don t worry you aren t the first It s happened to a good many of us and here s the good news assuming your machine is powerful enough to handle the program you can get it up and running smoothly 11 1 Game settings There are a great many game settings to worry about in IL 2 In fact they are there to help you out not to confuse you In general the more powerful a tool is the more you have to invest in learning about it at the beginning IL 2 has great flexibility it can perform on a wide range of systems These settings are what help you tweak performance for your own system As mentioned in section 10 5 1 the settings that will be discussed in this section affect the quality of graphical rendering by telling the hardware how to use its resources They are different from the in game settings found under the Video Options menu The principal tool to work with is il2setup exe or just il2setup and it has a straightfor ward graphical user interface GUI and is located in the IL 2 Stur movik root folder You can t do everything wi
78. ll swing when small excursions are made from the correct heading A third possibility which can be very demanding and satisfying is to abandon both the autopilot and in flight map and use visual flying rules VFR In this method you will compare the landscape with a map to locate your position and choose your heading Since in IL 2 you cannot turn off your own map icon you might consider printing out a map of the area of operations Example maps can be found at 15 Here are some tips for VFR navigation Always study the map in detail before a mission This is generally a good idea anyway Know where your base is relative to the front lines and relative to the mission area This way you at least know in which general direction to head to get back to base north east southeast etc Your map will show you where your target area you may need to mark it beforehand and base are located After that you can use rivers patches of forest lakes cities 61 62 Combat fundamentals mountains coastline and whatever else you find useful to determine your location Rivers are usually plentiful and specially shaped rivers are very helpful for confirming location Don t be afraid to go off your guessed course to make sure you are in the location you think you are If you are on the way home and really can t make out where you are try using the radio to request a heading to base Be prepared to listen carefully to the reply in German or R
79. ll undershoot un less you compensate for the effect of gravity pulling the bombs down and away from the straight line of your dive This compensation is known as the bombing angle you begin to pull out before bomb release which will correct for the lag caused by gravity The amount of rotation to al low before bomb release will depend on the speed of dive the height of the release point the lower the release point the smaller the required correction and dive angle the further off vertical the larger the re quired correction It will be readily appreciated that the vertical dive is a considerable help to accuracy but failing that training to dive at a set angle and releasing at a set altitude makes accurate bombing eas ier Without controlling the variables in this way it is very difficult to calculate the bombing angle for a given dive A commonly used method 8 1 Ground attack is to release the bombs when the target begins to disappear under the nose of the aircraft during your pullout In IL 2 the Stuka will automatically pull out the moment you release the bombs In Forgotten Battles you will need to manually disengage the airbrake as well Be careful that you do not pull out too late and follow your bombs into the ground particularly if you are not using a Stuka and do not have automatic pullout Try trimming your fighter bomber tail heavy and push your stick forward during the dive to stay straight this will make your pullo
80. lso linked from the official site and are General Discussion Technical Support Forum Squadron Forum Oleg s Ready Room Mission Builder Forum e Paint Schemes Forum Chat Room 12 2 Online resources It is possible that short reviews of relevant websites and online re sources are beneficial here At the moment there is an appallingly short list of links at Eastern Skies which will at least lead to sites with more complete list of links 104 The IL 2 community 12 3 How much is too much The sim bug has a nasty bite You might want to get that looked at Oth ers who have gone before you have found their answers to the question You know you play too much IL 2 when e you feel uneasy when travelling under 160 kph YaksKill 12 28 01 e you try to explain to people how the nose cannon in a Bf 109 can t hold a candle to the quad 20 mm cannons in a FW 190 and can t seem to get through to them Harry14843 12 28 01 e you see a girl walking by and you hate RL for not having zoom weasel75 2 15 03 e someone changes lanes to get behind you and you instinctively try to get behind HIM mllaneza 2 15 03 e your car pulls to the left due to bad alignment and you look for the rudder trim knob to correct for it I really did this Metlushko 2 16 03 e you pull into the driveway park your car leap out and run 50 yards and throw yourself on the ground cos there s always a vulcher somewhere LvT e you are
81. m you very quickly but they also fall towards earth What s more many of the planes you will fight with have guns in the wings Not only does this reduce the maneuverability of the plane it creates a sizeable distance between the more or less parallel paths of the bullets as they leave your plane That s not so great if you think about it because you are hoping that they ll all end up in the same place on your target The answer to these worrying problems is to set the paths of the bullets to converge at a distance in front of the plane that you expect the target to be This is illustrated in figure 23 6 1 2 Gun reticle The gun sight in most planes in IL 2 Sturmovik use a reflector sight or reticle which is your main method of estimating where your shells will go like the crosshairs in a rifle scope This is pretty intuitive so we ll try to just point out a few noteworthy things First of all the reticle itself is a piece of glass slanted backward towards you The yellow pattern you see on it is reflected light that is being projected from below The main advantage of this system is that as your head moves a bit out of position with the glass plate and the target the reflected light tells you this is this true A further historical advantage is that this system made it easier to adjust the sights to point to the convergence set for the guns There are also either concentric rings or tick marks on the crosshairs These are mean
82. mation make lightning fast decisions and act without hesitation If your goal is to become a superior fighter pilot you might decide to find or set up a program to train yourself In this guide we hope to provide you with information that will help make you more aware of what you need but it is up to you to train 6 3 Detection and closing The OODA process teaches us that you have to be able to make observa tions and orient yourself faster than the enemy On a larger and slower The OODA cycle 59 60 Combat fundamentals scale you also want to detect the enemy and close on him before he does You will go through the OODA cycle several times while doing this but detection and closing are the first two steps in an engagement just like observation and orientation are the first two steps in the Boyd cycle Detection of the enemy is a simple concept see the other guy before he sees you Closing involves maneuvering your aircraft to a po sition of advantage nearly always above and often if possible behind the enemy Simple as that may be there is a lot involved in this competition to spot the enemy first and as much or more in maneuvering to an advantage 6 4 View systems icons mp_dotrange map padlock snap pan mouse TrackIR view ing frame rates 6 5 Navigation Mission success is often critically dependent on your flight being able to reach the mission area in a timely fashion at the right altitude and from a
83. n the weight will be greater than the lift in the vertical That means that the airplane will want to start accelerating downward To maintain your altitude you will have to provide enough backpressure to increase the angle of attack This will increase the lift so that the vertical component of lift matches weight again and also reduces the airspeed The circle that the airplane follows in the turn has a radius For any airplane the radius of the turn is determined only by the speed of the airplane and the bank angle 9 etc etc etc Now that was a lot of explaining but it is important that you get the idea that all of the axes of movement are involved in a turn If you are thinking ahead you will realize that this explanation has its limits Once you take the bank attitude beyond 45 the lift component becomes 5 8 Landing largely horizontal and you can control the 5 7 2 The vertical component 5 7 3 Efficiency Turning radius vs turn rate 10 5 8 Landing Outside of combat landing your aircraft is the most challenging and ex citing procedure you are called to perform There s nothing more beau tiful than a good landing To make a safe proper landing especially un der non ideal circumstances requires a lot of concentration even when you know exactly what you re doing The landing procedure starts with an approach You will have a certain altitude and airspeed and you will headed in a certain direc tion relative to
84. nav igation that s another Either way it s not very immersive and probably less fun After all you re in a flight simulator why should you let the computer fly instead of yourself In IL 2 you are perfectly capable of navigating without the autopilot A second possibility is simply to use the in flight map to follow the paths between waypoints which are clearly marked If you have map icons enabled this will also tell you where both friendly and enemy air craft are For full immersion turn them off Unfortunately you can t turn your own aircraft icon off As soon as you pass through or some times near a waypoint you will see a line extending from your aircraft icon to the next waypoint By following this line you will easily be able to navigate to the intended areas of your mission It is important to recognize that your flight will also follow these waypoints and that if you are flight leader you can command your flight to remain at a given waypoint or proceed to the next one The map does not inform you at what altitude and airspeed the flight should be Many of the aircraft have a repeater compass that indicates the di rection to the next waypoint By aligning your heading with this direc tion you will be able to navigate to the next waypoint without needing to rely on your in flight map The repeater compass does not indicate how far you are from the next waypoint but the closer you are to the waypoint the further the needle wi
85. nd runs the incomparable STURMOVIK TECHNIKA gladly consented to let me steal some of the web layout and look for my version of the Eastern Skies website Simon Griffee sgriffee put a lot of effort into giving the Eastern Skies site a professional facelift The code is ready and has long been held up by the technical difficulties involved in finding access for him to a server that can host the site There are more to be sure The credits will be zealously updated as 106 Acknowledgements soon as possible BIBLIOGRAPHY 1 D Loza and J F ed Gebhardt Attack of the Airacobras Soviet Aces American P 39s and the Air War against Germany Univer sity Press of Kansas 2000 3 1 1 2 C Catton and H Wilson eds Warplanes of WWII Chartwell Books Inc 2001 3 1 2 3 1C Maddox Games IL 2 Sturmovik WWII Combat Simulator User Manual Ubi Soft Entertainment software manual 2001 4 10 12 4 J S Denker See How It Flies online book http www monmouth com jsd how 1996 4 7 9 4 7 2 12 5 2 8 5 9 10 26 5 EURO_Snoopy and Hunter82 Mudmovers http www mudmovers com 2003 4 2 6 U S Army Pilot s Flight Operating Instructions for Army Model P 39Q 1 Airplane Pilot s notes 1942 3 7 A Bush Secondary flight controls flaps http www simhq com _air air_002a html 2002 10 5 1 8 R Preston Selkirk college aviation intranet online man ual http 142
86. nding and takeoff speed This feature came to be applied more and more as they began to build planes that were faster and heavier a way was needed to allow heavy aircraft to safely fly slowly enough to land By the second World War flaps had become a standard feature This means that when you deploy flaps and other high lift devices you can expect two things to happen the aircraft will get a boost in lift at the price of increased drag It is important to think not just of lift or drag but to recall that there is a ratio of lift to drag textbooks talk about the coefficient of lift and coefficient of drag Interestingly enough these both depend mostly on angle of attack but of course extending flaps alters both drastically The extra drag means that you will either slow down or have to decrease the rate of climb to maintain airspeed This is also a benefit of course The extra lift means that you can fly more slowly without reducing the rate of climb or increasing the rate of descent as you like The lift gained also means you can climb more steeply See section for more information on how flaps affect climb Alternatively after deploying flaps you can increase thrust if the engine permits to maintain airspeed and or rate of climb Flaps thus afford increased stability at lower airspeeds and can also be used to brake the aircraft Since they produce a significant amount of drag there is tremendous pressure on the flaps when they are deplo
87. ng blocks your view sometimes the plating is there but transparent Some air craft have bubble canopies and some have terrible rearward visibility In a few aircraft the pilot sits further forward or behind the wings and enjoys an increased downward field of view Learn to use the full field of view of an aircraft This is true not only of the OWI but also of the indicators in the cockpit Human binocular vision is not modeled and you can t move your point of view to the side so sometimes you just can t see a given instrument Instruments hidden by the stick can be seen by moving the stick well to the side not recommended practice in critical situations or at low altitudes Unfortunately some of the compasses are 90 or so off be sure to compare them to the heading shown in the speed bar 21 22 Ground school Art horiz Variometer Ammo qty Type Model Bf109 E4 E 7 B E 7 Z F 2 F 4 G 2 G 6 G 6 Late G 6 AS FW 190 A 4 A 5 A 8 Ju 87 B 2 SSSSSSSSSS SS Prop pos SKOSSSSSS 1 SOSSSSSS 1 SSS SSS SSS SSS S Turn amp Bank SNS ISISIISISISISSSSNSS Altimeter NSSS SSS SS SS S S Heading SSSSSSSSS SS S NI Man press SISISSSSSISSSSS SNI Airspeed ISISIISISISISSSSNSS Tachometer ISISISISISISSSSSS Fuel SQN NN NNN NAA SOil temp SSS SS SS SS S S S A Oil press ISISIISISISISISSSSS Clock Table 4 1 German cockpit instruments 4 3 Starting up In IL 2 starting the engine is a snap you just press I on t
88. nstruments in the cockpits of modern jets but I certainly have learned a lot about the gauges of the 1930s and 40s Being able to tell what is going on with your plane from its panel is a vital aspect of being a pilot and although we will not get into heavy detail you will greatly benefit from being able to decipher some of the more critical gauges Keep in mind that all of the topics mentioned here have not been discussed yet you might want to come back and read this section again after you have learned more about flight basics in later sections Refer to the illustrations in the instrumentation guide that came with 4 1 Gauges and levers and toggles oh my IL 2 to compare the instruments to your cockpit You might want to climb into a cockpit of your choice and identify these instruments as you read through the descriptions below Altimeter As mentioned in the documentation this is your altitude above sea level either in meters kilometers or feet The little hand shows thousands and the big hand hundreds or in German machines the hand shows tenths of kilometers hundreds of me ters and the counter at the bottom shows kilometers Some air planes had this gauge zeroed to their airfield altitude this is not so in IL 2 Itis useful in navigation combat and any time you are close to the ground Airspeed indicator This one is pretty obvious at first glance It is critical to know the speed with which your aircraft is meeting the air
89. o known as AAA anti aircraft artillery or Flak Anti Aircraft guns whether heavy or light flak can be de stroyed easily with almost any weapon from cannon upwards a short burst of cannon fire is sufficient Of course it has the un pleasant habit of firing back and techniques for surviving flak are dealt with later in this chapter When you are flying down the barrel of flak jinking is not an option you must stay absolutely steady in your approach The section on dealing with Flak below will help you to minimise exposure to this unpleasant situation Soft Skinned vehicles Soft skinned vehicles are those without sig nificant armor The most common soft skinned vehicles you will encounter are trucks cars and motorcycle sidecar combinations A few rounds of accurate cannon fire will suffice to destroy soft skinned vehicles Parked or grounded aircraft Heavy cannon fire is a good weapon against planes on the ground but a good deal of damage has to be inflicted to score a kill When attacking a flying plane disabling flying surfaces or engines will allow gravity to finish off your prey Therefore weapons such as bombs and rockets are justified against planes larger planes such as bombers demand heavier ordnance 8 1 Ground attack Boats and subs Rockets medium bombs sustained cannon fire and obviously torpedoes will all sink boats and subs Armored vehicles and tanks Heavy cannon may be adequate against targets with light or med
90. o technically a taildragger the BI 1 also has good forward visibility 4 6 Attack planes you will have to be much more careful Normally you cannot de tect anything directly in front of you including parked planes Since you don t have anyone to walk your wing you will need to turn the plane to one side with the rudder and brakes if really necessary and a burst of throttle so that you can see any objects in your path through the front quarter panel of the cockpit Be sure to take advantage of the engine torque by turning to the side the plane naturally swings toward Again be careful to unlock the tail wheel before carrying out this procedure and to lock it again after having started moving forward for takeoff 4 6 Attack Those first few sections were all okay but now we re coming to the really practical stuff You re about to be prepped for learning how an airplane really flies The first thing we have to do is get used to the idea that we re going to be controlling a vehicle that moves about through the air So before you get into the air there s something you ought to know about controlling the airplane it s not a car Really it s not In a car to go faster you give it more gas or maybe shift gears but in an airplane there is an extra dimension of movement and it s a little more complex For instance opening up the throttle might not change your airspeed much at all This is so in a car as well when the car is headed up a
91. ockpit they re not always highly legible especially in stressful circumstances which are not entirely unheard of in combat aircraft but some times they re all you ve got In some cockpits the magnetic com pass is partially or fully obscured by the control stick or other ob ject Turn and bank indicator Also called the turn and slip indicator this gyroscopic device provides indirect information about the bank an gle of the wings and the coordination of a turn The ball shows the direction of a slip or skid so you should step on the ball Both are useful for steadying the aircraft to hit targets especially the slip indicator It might help you fly turns more efficiently but not always It is very helpful in trimming out the plane against slip Much more to write here Manifold pressure gauge This handy but tricky gauge measures the pressure in the intake system of the engine It is handy because in many circumstances Estimate of the power developed by the 4 1 Gauges and levers and toggles oh my engine With the engine turned off it measures the ambient air pressure When the engine is running with the throttle closed the engine creates suction in the intake and the MP gauge shows a lower pressure With the throttle wider open it shows a higher pressure At full throttle the pressure should be again be close to ambient pressure When ambient pressure which varies with altitude and engine rpm are taken into account
92. off Moving the rudder pedal to the left steers you toward the left and vice versa For gradual 2If you do not have rudder pedals use the twist action of your joystick or the keys for rudder control the and keys by default 23 On the ground steer with the rudder 24 Brake softly but liberally Ground school turns the rudder alone will often provide you with sufficient steering control The faster your forward speed the more authority the rudder has and the more danger you are in of an accident You will probably notice this during takeoff At the low speeds used for taxiing sometimes the rudder is not enough to turn sharply For sharper turns the planes are equipped with a differential braking system which is handy since your ground crew is never to be found There is only one control for the wheel brakes so the differential braking is activated by the rudder input If you want to turn left sharply give full left rudder and then apply the wheel brake control Holding the wheel brake for too long is not usually good un less you want to stop the plane To turn even more quickly you can give quick bursts of throttle Note the following from 6 Turning the airplane with one wheel locked is very bad practice as it grinds rubber from the tire and may overstrain the spindles of the main landing gear to a point where they will later fail on landing or take off In addition overbraking can quickly heat up the b
93. oint you lose a significant amount of lift your plane starts to accelerate not just to descend at a controlled rate but to accelerate toward earth This can happen not just in level flight or slow speeds but in any maneuver and at any airspeed Well find out more about how relevant this is later on So what leads to the condition of an angle of attack that will cause a stall The practical answer is it varies from aircraft to aircraft Each airplane has its individual stall and stall recovery characteristics Ed itor s note could contrast the examples from the P 39 and P 40 pilot s notes There is certainly that can be added here 5 2 Energy You may have already asked yourself What does energy do for me any way As it turns out energy doesn t do anything energy is You might instead think of it as something your aircraft has Have you ever read something to the effect of When you re fighting you ve got to keep your E Well now you know E stands for energy Understanding the energy your aircraft has and in what forms is key to knowing what to do next to control your aircraft What is our coveted friend E in the context of flight Of all the kinds of energy that are out there aviation generally involves four kinetic potential chemical and what we could call dissipated energy Kinetic energy is the energy an object has when it is moving such as a ball thrown through the air It depends on the mass and speed of
94. or give any aileron input because this only makes things worse e Give full rudder in the direction opposite of spin 5 9 Take her for a spin e Move the stick quickly to get a zero angle of attack e Once the spin has stopped and both wings are unstalled keep the nose below the horizon and apply full throttle e Once you have enough airspeed for stable flight slowly bring the aircraft out of its dive Normal spin recovery procedures tend to only make an inverted spin worse If all else fails leave yourself enough altitude to exit stage right see section 6 6 51 CHAPTER 6 Combat fundamentals The objective is to kill the bandit That s it Pure and simple That and stay alive in the process So do what you have to But kill the bandit dead Anything else is rubbish Andy Bush It is not until you are shaking down the runway at 110kph that you realize for the first time that this morning s haze might make lining up the the approach difficult when you re turn later If you return only one pilot of yesterday morning s patrol Zveno had that good fortune Such habitual thoughts don t distract you very long and as your well weathered Ilyushin 2 passes 210kph you initiate a lazy turn toward your next waypoint over Orel Forests and rivers shrouded in this haze slip beneath your wings on the twenty minute hop to your tar get and by now it doesn t take so much concentration to stay in formation You use
95. ore attractive to the eye but this being an Internet document it is a difficult call to what extent they ought to be included Some illustrations are already included and more are likely to appear but the document should not become prohibitively large One possible solution is to make a version of the document that leaves large graphics out and places a hyperlink that leads to an online version of the graphic This has the advantage of leaving the choice of downloading graphics to the user The manual may eventually be converted to a HTML format How ever this depends on its success and the ratio of amount of work in volved to the amount of available help CONTENTS 1 Introduction 2 Air war on the Eastern Front 3 Machines of war 3 1 Aircraft of the Voyenno Vozdushnyye Sily 3 1 1 Fighters es 2408 8 ee a de 4 3 12 Ground attack aircraft 2 65 2 4 eed os 3 1 3 Transport and reconnaissance 3 2 Aircraft of the Luftwaffe 3 2 1 A ae ae ne ie Bra el a 3 2 2 Ground attack aircraft 3 2 3 Transport and reconnaissance 3 3 Armament and loadout 4 Ground school 4 1 Gauges and levers and toggles oh my 4 2 Cockpit orientation 4 3 OUNT UD an ee ee Aa 4A Checklists escalas dede A A A AD ARMIN 4 5 2 ee ar E a ad oe EIERN se er A e Y 4 7 Secondary control surfaces 4 7 1 The effect of
96. parison to cannon rounds and there are often lots more of them loaded Tracers 6 2 Situational awareness 6 1 4 Angle off shooting There are pretty much two situations in which you can point your gun sight straight at a target and expect to hit it in head on passes and from the six o clock position of the targeted aircraft If you d like to hit the target right where your crosshairs are pointing then the target had better be at a distance where your shells will all converge Angle off is just a term used to say that the fuselage of your plane and that of your target have a small angle between them Think of a narrow cone extending behind or in front ofan airplane Other airplanes in that cone are in an angle off position The reason it s so much easier to hit the other planes from an angle off position is that bullets don t travel in a straight line as already dis cussed in convergence 6 1 5 Deflection shooting Give more angle than you think is necessary Don t clench the stick rudder pedals might help a lot here since you won t have to twist the stick to coordinate the turn There is a set of wonderful articles 11 written by Andy Bush that will help you learn a lot more about gunnery 6 2 Situational awareness The absolute most valuable thing to a pilot is an understanding of his surroundings including the condition of his own aircraft This is true both in and out of combat and a pilot is constantly gathering info
97. primary flight control surfaces xii CONTENTS 272 Ts AR AAA RS 30 A473 E A IN 34 5 Flight 37 A AS 37 8 2 Energy asociar daa a EDS 39 5 3 Changing altitude and airspeed 40 5 3 1 The power curve 43 9 8 2 Examples asiste rm ba 43 54 Takeo s RA RA RAR ee BD 43 DAL Therolo t zoia secere diae a A AA 43 5 4 2 Lift off and initiating a climb 44 543 seofllaps 0 rata Na Sn 45 SE NN e oe ga aaa i be ea ay Sy ee ee re ee 45 5 6 evel Might sese s ei Gwe ee tr a as sen 45 5 7 Lurmng su 6 4 5 bow GRR ee eh 46 5 7 1 Horizontal turns and coordination 46 5 7 2 Theverticalcomponent 48 Bis MEDICINE 0 ua meiner een 48 DS E A 49 5 9 Take her fora spin 49 5 9 1 Preventing spins 49 5 9 2 Typesofspins 0 0 000 eee 50 5 9 3 Getting outofspins 04 50 6 Combat fundamentals 51 6 1 Gunnery emocion e 52 6 1 1 Convergence ic 2 4 aa ehr 53 6 1 2 Gun reticle cercar AHS han 53 6 1 3 Machine guns and cannons 54 6 1 4 Angle off shooting 2222 nn 55 6 1 5 Deflection shooting 55 6 2 Situational awareness 55 6 3 Detection and closing 57 6 4 View systems 58 Go Navigation sisi a a SO 58 6 6 Emergency procedures 61 66 1 Bailing ont een Ben ern 61 6 6 2 Forced landings
98. r gives a measure of the pitch of the propeller or the angle at which it meets the air In most ap plications in German and other aircraft you can leave the blade pitch control on automatic In a few circumstances you may be able to use manual pitch control to make finer adjustments to the engine management In most other aircraft the tachometer rpm is used as an indicator of the propeller control Most of the VVS 19 20 Ground school aircraft use constant speed propellers which do not require this indicator OWI The outside world indicator is implemented in most aircraft as a large transparent material often referred to simply as the wind screen Pilots must check this indicator regularly to maintain sit uational awareness Under low visibility conditions it can become highly unreliable Of all of these instruments we can identify six that are the most often used in flight the airspeed indicator altimeter artificial horizon turn and bank indicator heading indicator and climb indicator You may have heard of pilots referring to an instrument scan This pro cess which is critical to low visibility flying involves the checking of these six important instruments starting with the artificial horizon and the decision making that must be done before making major atti tude changes 4 2 Cockpit orientation Each aircraft cockpit has its own layout of various gauges selectors levers and switches Some are more
99. r poison Personally ld be willing to tolerate the ex tra demands placed on servers to know that I had a cheat free game and I m willing to put up with false cheat messages if it will help to the end or preventing cheating Cheaters are slugs It s a good thing that most of the people with the skill to write cheat programs would rather write good programs like Lowingrin s or Starshoy s dynamic campaign programs or like Stur molog or Tonkin s Mission Saver or like the RAF74 IL2 FB Dynamic Campaign System or like any of the other wonderful user mods out there But it only takes one programmer who would rather use his skill to destroy a game by cheating rather than to use his skill to enhance a game Once the program is written it starts getting passed around I always laugh when I see someone bragging about how they can do this or they can do that when you know that all they are doing is read ing instructions on how to use a program someone else wrote Like it makes them a better person because they can cheat at Red Baron 3D or 99 100 Technical hints something Get a life Now I know someone is going to read this and think that I m telling the world how to cheat To an extent I am but you can imagine that the people with the skill to utilize this stuff already know how to do it it isn t rocket science I think the community SHOULD know how it s possible to cheat so that they also know what to look for and we can hav
100. raking surfaces and glaze them In the sim we are not constrained to worry about such things and you can adopt the bad practice of overbraking liberally Be careful though too much braking can cause a nose up causing a prop strike or even flipping your airplane To start moving make sure that the tail wheel is not locked and clear the engine with a burst of thrust this latter is more a real world procedure You will need a fair amount of thrust but once the plane starts moving back off on the throttle to about 10 25 thrust real world procedure calls for a certain amount of rpm depending on the airplane your load and how fast you want to go If you start to go too fast just ease the throttle to idle and gently apply the brakes It is generally recommended to open the oil and coolant shutters use R when taxiing Most modern day airplanes have tricycle landing gear and fairly good forward visibility on the ground Of the flyable planes in IL 2 only the P 39 enjoys this advantage The other planes have the third wheel at the tail of the plane and are known as taildraggers In these 3If you have rudder pedals that support toe braking you can assign one of the toe brake axes to the wheel brake HOTAS Such a slider control gives you various degrees of braking Otherwise you can use the keyboard B by default The nose gear of the P 39 is also coordinated with the rudder to give it additional turning ability gt Although als
101. rcraft in IL 2 are more or less trimmed when you start a flight session to maintain a good climbing speed so if you don t retrim you need little stick input to get the right speed once you have achieved it and are in the climb Many inexperienced pilots want to just get up in the air as fast as they can after taking off and keep their nose too high Even if they are not as low as stall speed and are climbing their high attitude keeps the airspeed down and they re on the front side of the power curve Allow your airspeed to build up The only exception is when you need a high climb angle to clear any obstacles 5 4 3 Use of flaps Now all of you Sturmovik and Stuka pilots pay careful attention load factor has to be considered here 5 5 Yaw Because your aircraft is moving through the air it is possible for it to point in a different direction than it goes The job of the rudder is to minimize that difference The difference is described by the slip angle and it has a big role to play in the efficient and safe operation of your aircraft It also plays a big role in your comfort because being pushed from side to side is not always pleasant Although you unfortunately don t have this to worry about in IL 2 it can become pretty inconvenient to have your head misaligned with the gunsight Yaw is an often overlooked axis of flight You will have a hard time maintaining your energy during turns without managing your yaw axis Keep an eye out in
102. re like having money in the bank and fuel in the tank is like money in savings but in all situations you have to pay for drag like paying for rent Some aircraft have to pay a higher rent than others You as pilot can convert between the different forms of energy You can trade altitude for airspeed and vice versa quickly and you can use fuel to gain altitude airspeed and pay the rent Energy is better conserved when you do this smartly Energy is also related to but different from something else you ve already heard of power Remember that the throttle controls power Power is quite simply the rate at which energy is used A 60 Watt light bulb is one that burns 60 Joules per second So power is energy over a period of time When we say power we re talking about how fast we are gaining losing or converting energy When we speak of an engine s horsepower we are indicating how fast that engine can overcome the aircraft s inertia to convert fuel into the other forms of energy namely airspeed and altitude Let s not get into inertia 5 3 Changing altitude and airspeed Climbing descending speeding up and slowing down are all a matter of managing your account at the First United Energy Bank you ll be trading in one form of energy to gain another and paying the rent what a drag In fact this is so energy related it is really an extension of the tA Joule is a standard measure of energy just like a second is standard measure of tim
103. rizontal but after practice you may find it to be a good friend in tight spots It s a great help when playing hide and seek in the clouds 17 Ground school Climb indicator Also referred to as the variometer If you make grad ual changes in the climb rate it shows you the rate of climb or descent in m s or ft minx1000 The instrument doesn t react in stantly to changes in climb rate When making quick changes rely on the altimeter first For instance many times the altimeter reading is decreasing when the variometer still shows a climb Heading indicator The IL 2 User Manual refers to this as the re peater compass or remote reading compass This instrument is purely for navigational purposes but don t go underestimating the importance of navigation in aviation The idea is to use the read ing to get yourself oriented toward the next waypoint Yes the technology for this really existed back then One needle shows your current heading the Russian version doesn t have this and the other shows the direction of the next waypoint Keep the nee dle lined up to navigate your course In planes that have both the heading indicator can also be a handier reference than the harder to read magnetic compass when going through turns especially in combat Magnetic compass Also known as the turn indicator or whiskey com pass You may have used one of these in a forest once they float in a liquid and point toward magnetic north In the c
104. rma tion about his situation Not surprisingly there are good ways to do this and then there are better ways You are surely aware by now that there is no small amount of information available Obviously the vari ous tidbits of information must also be given a priority and the priority changes depending on how the situation develops Beyond that once the information has been gathered something has to be done with it You ve known this all along of course It s intuitive However in combat things can get a little stressy and considering beforehand what information to gather and practicing gathering it will help build up a little discipline You want to train your mind to constantly be observ ing the information relevant to your situation If you d like to better appreciate the high level of awareness that combat pilots had just read 57 58 Combat fundamentals some of their combat reports Among the more relevant aspects of sit uational awareness in combat are Altitude Airspeed Engine power setting Condition of the engine and general engine management Position of gear flaps radiator cowl flaps propeller pitch and other settings Damage to your aircraft and its impact on your capability to per form maneuvers Weather conditions and forecast conditions the current and pre dicted visibility direction and strength of wind humidity etc as a function of altitude Position of the sun relative to you your unit an
105. rmations 6 64 i264 ria eee ERG 75 9 Advanced topics 77 9 1 Angle of attack stability 77 9 1 1 Changing angle ofattack 77 9 1 2 Phugoid oscillations 78 92 TOGUE Aa sia ee ea ee ee a 78 9 3 Engine management 2 000 202s 78 xiv 9 4 G and its effects 9 5 Landing revisited 9 5 1 Practice at altitude 9 5 2 Go around or salvage 9 5 3 Cross wind landings 9 6 Night operations 9 7 Techniques of formation flying 10 IL 2 features and references TO AE e os Ge wen SO yc Ph He EA 10 2 Controls 2 2 22 20 we 18 2 1 HOTAS over 4 4 28 87 2 10 2 2 Joystick settings 10 3 View objects 10 4 Credits 2 0 0 2 004 20 dara 10 5 Hardware setup 10 5 1 Video modes 10 5 2 Video options 10 5 3 Sound setup 10 5 4 Input ce asss cresen 10 5 5 Network 10 6 Tracks ci a eee der 10 7 Training 24 ora a nah 10 8 Quick Mission Builder QMB 10 9 Single missions 10 10Pilot career campaigns 10 1Multiplay flying online 10 11 1Dogfights AP 10 11 2000B8 3k ae 2 a BER 10 12Full Mission Builder FMB 10 1Demo se ak ok a a LO Patches ocio 4 ua 11 Technical hints 11 1 Game settings 11 1 1 il2setup exe 11 1 2 Confini 5 24 ara ee 11 2 Terminology
106. rth This can really add to immersion But whatever you do don t count on your autopilot to get you home unless you like repeating missions and losing results At best you can engage the autopilot for about 10 20 seconds until it gets you on course for home then take the controls again Keep in mind the autopilot will set the course for the next waypoint not necessarily the base 6 6 Emergency procedures 6 6 Emergency procedures Flak Twenty millimeter cannon An unusable airframe A dead or burning engine An unrecoverable spin No fuel All reasons for you to think critically about how to get home safely Sometimes you can set her down sometimes you have to hit the silk How do you know when to do what 6 6 1 Bailing out You hope you never have to do it but it happened to the best and often more than once Sometimes your baby is not salvagable and you ve got to bail The command for this in IL 2 is the key combination Ctr1 E After a delay the pilot will open the canopy and jump from the plane 6 6 2 Forced landings 6 7 How to get started This section will lay out some commonly given hints for the new combat pilot about how to get started with gunnery and maneuvering 63 CHAPTER 7 Combat maneuvers You wouldn t talk very long with experienced combat pilots before you start to get the impression that combat is not simply a sequence of fancy maneuvers However 7 1 Energy fighting 7 2 Maneuverability 7
107. ry considerable weight and adaptability to different loadouts are therefore advantageous Speed Spending as little time as possible in a ground attack plane in the flak zone tends to keep pilots healthier Speed also assists in reach ing and leaving the target area unmolested by enemy fighters Don t make yourself an easy target Stability Ground attack targets are usually small and since they are slow and thus static relative to your aircraft closing speed is high Therefore the ability to fly a precise and steady flight path towards the target is essential Launching rockets or firing high caliber weapons can shake a plane so a stable gun platform will increase the likelihood of getting hits Using trim correctly will help you make the most of the stability of your plane 8 1 2 Delivering the payload Level bombing Without a specialist bomb sight these are available in Forgotten Bat tles even remotely accurate level bombing takes a good deal of prac tice Once released your bombs will travel forward at the same speed as your plane minus loss of speed from drag so you should aim to be directly over your target at the time of impact You have to get as low as possible to achieve accuracy with level bombing The lower you are 8 1 Ground attack the later you leave bomb release Of course since you are over the target at time of impact it is important that you have a bomb delay of at least three seconds to give you time to escap
108. s for combat are covered in chapter 7 What we want to cover here are some turning basics and how to turn efficiently We could say that there are three categories of turns horizontal vertical and some combination of the two Horizontal turns are gener ally more familiar and the most commonly used in general The vertical component of a turn is quite often very useful in combat and only in cer tain fighting styles do you need to go purely vertical so most of the time in combat we combine the two We don t want to give you the wrong impression combat is not all about turning However it is a very im portant factor and there is plenty to read about it later on Let s get started with horizontal turns 5 7 Turning Lift AV vector Figure 5 1 With the wings banked the lift vector receives a horizontal compo nent at the cost of some of the original vertical component The resulting slip causes the tail to yaw which changes the planes direction and begins a turn 5 7 1 Horizontal turns and coordination Your airplane turns the same way it climbs through the lift vector You can picture the lift as pointing straight up from the wings so in level flight the lift vector only points straight up Manipulating the ailerons causes a higher lift in one wing than the other so that the wings roll to one side The pilot rolls the wings to a bank angle or bank attitude and hold it there In this banked position the lift vector is
109. siest way to avoid a spin is thus to avoid a stall and we already know how to do that stay below a critical angle of attack Theoretically then you will never need to worry about spins because you are going to behave and not push your airplane into a stall Experience says that pilots starting out in IL 2 are not only going to stall a lot but they are going to do a fair amount of spinning too and use up at least a few dozen virtual lives in the process 5 9 2 Types of spins Since the voice of experience says you are going to end up in a spin at some point it is important to distinguish between three main modes of spins normal flat and inverted spins A normal spin A flat spin An inverted spin is obviously a spin in which the airplane is upside down They are particularly dangerous because they have to first be converted into a normal spin before they can be recovered from so even more precious altitude is lost before recovery 5 9 3 Getting out of spins The general thing to do to get out of a spin is to oppose the direction of spin and to unstall the stalled wing The challenge is to do this before you lose too much altitude whether your criterion be minimizing lost energy in combat or avoiding the ground Be warned each aircraft has its own spin characteristic In most aircraft the basic technique is as follows e Cut throttle all the way back to idle e Center the stick Whatever you do don t pull back
110. so ex pect to apply the stuff we learned in the last section about climbing We ve already covered the first task of taxiing down the runway at high power to build up airspeed beyond what will allow you to start climb ing It is imperative to understand what a critical role airspeed plays In takeoff you will in practice pull back a very small amount on the stick to make the slight transition from ground airspeed to a climbing attitude In theory once you have reached takeoff speed a properly trimmed air plane will take itself off but usually you will want to help it with slight backpressure What you do not want to do is initiate a zoom climb You can only successfully zoom climb when you have excess airspeed and usually there is precious little of that just after takeoff If you pull back too far on the stick you are in danger of running out of airspeed stalling and finding yourself unable to recover before you return to your original altitude the ground You P 39 jocks just pretend you didn t read that 8about twelve degrees worth 4 5 5 Yaw Unless you are in a powerful and light fighter after initially get ting off the ground it is good practice to accelerate to a good climbing airspeed somewhere in the area of V before you begin climbing further The angle of attack corresponding to this airspeed will keep the airplane at a good climbing speed and allow the excess engine power to be trans lated into gained altitude The ai
111. st yaw problems rudder The same problem occurs during a landing roll out and the same procedure applies to correct it To go straight you need to hold a certain amount of rudder The faster you go the more rudder authority you have and less you need to hold the rudder down Now if the plane starts heading too far to one side use more Just make sure you don t overcorrect you need to use lots of rud der on the ground but if you do it too long you ll have the same problem in a new direction Learn to anticipate what is going to happen After a stretch the plane really starts picking up speed Once you reach a certain speed maybe around 100 kph the wings produce enough lift to bring the tail up we clever pilots notice this because the nose comes down In some planes such as the Bf 109 and the 1 16 you want to get the tail up as early as possible by pushing forward on the stick as you begin to roll out Don t forget to relax that forward pressure as you pick up speed and the tail will stay up on its own Before too long the plane will have reached a speed typically around 160 180 kph at which it can sustain its weight at a certain angle of attack once the nose is brought up slightly How long does this take then Until it s ready and not before learn the airspeed that has to be reached before you can pull back on the stick 5 4 2 Lift off and initiating a climb Taking off is little other than initiating a climb from level flight
112. t to be used to help line up deflection shots which you can read about below 2You don t mind if I just refer to all calibers of fired projectiles as bullets do you Good thanks 3Unless they re going straight down 55 56 Combat fundamentals SIGHT LINE Tiwi rai TIATT FIRII J JJ LII JE Convergence distance Figure 6 1 The paths of the projectiles are converging towards each other horizontally from the wings or to a certain height from below the pilot s line of sight In either case this doesn t happen until a certain distance from the plane which can be adjusted There s one more thing about that reticle that you ve surely noticed In many of these craft they were positioned so as to not line up with the pilot s normal line of sight That means that the pilot had to move his head a bit to see the target through the gun sight In IL 2 you can switch between a normal view and the gun sight view with the key combination Shift F1 6 1 3 Machine guns and cannons What s the big deal anyway After all the difference between 7 62mm and 37 mm is only a little more than an inch right It turns out that size does matter but also velocity and firing rate What you really ought to know is that machine guns are effective for finding targets and while they can do some damage it is the cannon fire that is usually going to bring planes down Machine gun rounds are lighter and are fired much faster in com
113. tanks if they have re volved to aim at you and you are being cautious consider breaking off the attack Once you have attacked change direction slightly forcing the tanks to use deflection when shooting at you Buildings structures and bridges Some structures are destructible in 112 some are not The only ones with tactical significance are bridges an example of this is in the first mission in the Il 2 cam paign in which the German armour can be prevented from reach ing the station you are defending by destroying the bridge Use bombs to destroy bridges Ships Ships are very difficult targets to destroyyou are likely to have 76 Ground pounding and fighter tactics the most success with torpedoes 8 1 5 Team tactics If you are flying as part of a team either human or Al teamwork can substantially improve your chances of destroying ground targets and es caping successfully If you are flying offline be ruthless in using your Al wingmen war is a tough business after all Order your AI planes to at tack your target and follow them in once the flak has locked onto them giving you a clearer run A common tactic was to send in flights to sup press Anti Aircraft Artillery before the main target was attacked this is an ideal job for your accurate nerveless but unimaginative Al pilots Specify AAA as their ground target while you stand off and observe re sults If time fuel and enemy fighter activity permits keep repeat
114. ted pilot will represent you when flying on line For each pilot on the register the individual control settings will be stored so when creating a new pilot you will either have to reassign all commands or copy the existing pilot settings from another account that has already been configured Pilot settings can be done by replacing the settings ini file of the new pilot s folder with the settings ini file of another under the IL 2 Sturmovik Users folder verify 84 IL 2 features and references 10 2 Controls Your controls are the interface between yourself and the simulator This includes keyboard commands the mouse joystick assignments rudder pedals and any viewing system such as TrackIR and other hardware you ve bought or made Just about everybody will at some time or an other want to change their settings to match their flying preferences Reaction time can mean the difference between life and death You don t want to have to delay a reaction because you don t know how to implement it There are 137 commands listed under Control Keys Ref erence in the fold out sheet that comes with IL 2 1 Many of these are for views or settings in a scale such as for throttle but there are a lot of commands and a quick look at the cockpits will remind you why There s no need to explain the exact function of all of these commands here because it s already been done and is hostedat STURMOVIK TECHNIKA I8 It is worth mentioning that you
115. th that program however As a matter of fact much of what the program does is make changes to 92 Technical hints text file named conf ini also located in the root folder If you open this file in a text editor you will be able to edit it and make a great deal more changes 11 1 1 il2setup exe The discussion of this tool is divided into its tab menus The setting Intro doesn t belong to any of the menus and is located at the bottom left of the dialog If this is checked the introduction track will play when you start IL 2 up It s novel at the beginning but after a while you will probably want to get rid of it Driver Here you will choose information about which graphics provider you want to run the game under and what video mode to run in OpenGL and DirectX are the two choices you have for application programming interfaces API and there are a certain number of previously deter mined graphics modes to choose from The game is optimized to run under OpenGL and with most sys tems you will get higher framerates with it DirectX although better supported by Microsoft of course may or may not make sense depend ing on your system The appearance of the graphics is definitely affected by the choice of API it is strongly affected by the graphics card so just experiment with both and see which you prefer Whichever one you do choose keep in mind that it will directly affect the best choice of video settings You d
116. the Spanish Civil War The enemy pilots rather disliked this pesky fighter and nicknamed it Rata Spanish for rat a name that continued to enjoy circulation among German pilots after 1941 3 1 Aircraft of the Voyenno Vozdushnyye Sily The Type 18 fighter is much the same as the Type 24 the latter enjoying a greatly increased armament with the 2x20 mm ShVAK can nons LaGG 3 This development of the Lavochkin La Gorbunov G and Gudkov G team had an all wood construction It is a capable fighter for its time with excellent maneuverability but quickly loses speed dur ing hard maneuvers Slower than the German fighters and not a quick climber it nevertheless has a strong armament that is better to be well respected It was replaced by the La 5 La 5FN Developed from the La 5 after the LaGG 3 the La 5 is avail able in Forgotten Battles the new fuel injected engine and improved structure created an agile Lavochkin fighter with lively acceleration that is one of the faster Soviet climbers It is blessed with good vis ibility through its bubble canopy and carries the only two weapons it needs nose mounted 20mm cannons with 200 rounds each synchro nized to fire through the propeller It serves best as a low to medium level fighter but can carry rockets or light bombs for ground attack The La 5FN is well respected by German fighters and was one of the main fighters of the war starting with the Battle of Kursk in summer of 1943 In a
117. the ob ject If you want to calculate it it is Ej lma where m is the mass and v is the speed Don t panic if you hate math Potential energy is the energy an object gets from gravity It is also simple to calculate E mgh where m is again the mass y the acceleration due to grav ity 9 8 m s downward and h the altitude or change in altitude if you want to calculate the difference in energy between altitudes Chemical 3We hope 39 40 Flight energy is the energy stored in the fuel It is a little more complicated to calculate but you could make a conversion factor as a function of altitude and mass of the aircraft and the volume of fuel burned 4 Dissipated energy is the energy the aircraft gives to the air it moves through You could think of this as energy lost as heat It too is more complicated to calculate but then again we re not here to calculate are we All that we need is the understanding that our aircraft always has an energy state and that it is necessary for us to be aware of what that energy state is and how to exchange between the types of energy Of course you can and will change the energy states An often heard analogy is that energy is like money in a bank account You can deposit and withdraw and even if you don t always need to carefully calculate you have to keep your balance up As with your bank account you normally want to keep your energy as high as possible Altitude and airspeed a
118. the relative wind again here the relative wind is taken to be the direction of flight The simplest case is in the first picture in level flight at cruise speed The angle of climb is zero and so is the pitch so the angle of attack is just the angle of incidence When the airplane is climbing if the air plane is pointed in the just the same direction as the climb this will be the case if it is climbing at a certain optimal speed then the angle of attack will be the same as it was in the case of level flight at cruise SEinstein would be relatively proud Actually you can t see that they re climbing but they are If you understand why you can t see it you re well on your way to understanding the lessons of this section 27 28 Throttle controls power Ground school speed In fact this is probably close to the case in Oleg s climb in fig ure 6 assume that the angle of the LaGG s climb is the same as the pitch attitude and you ll notice that the angle of attack is the same as the angle of incidence Now how did Oleg get into that climb in the first place To answer that let s go back to when Oleg was in level cruise It s a beautiful afternoon and the sun is low in the sky directly ahead but there are bandits about Not content with things Oleg increases the throttle setting Does he go faster You might be in for a surprise His plane immediately starts to climb and the airspeed indicator still shows around
119. the stick and then relax the stick pressure after the airplane slows down the airplane won t immediately resume normal trimmed flight It has a strong tendency to return to its trimmed angle of attack but will do it quickly enough that it swings past that an gle and oscillates around it a few times until it settles back down These oscillations occur whenever the airplane is disturbed from its trimmed airspeed or pitch attitude which is pretty often The aircraft essentially exchanges altitude and airspeed during these oscillations These oscil lations are slow enough for you to be able to correct them easily Simply use the stick to counter the tendency of the aircraft to exchange altitude for airspeed or vice versa 4 Adapt conversation in light of the goal of the section as described above 9 2 Torque Propwash P Factor etc Brief discussion of when which factor is rele vant and to what extent it is modeled in IL 2 9 3 Engine management Complex engine management Find the forum threads with effte ian boys myself and others Use the Deakin articles Emphasize that these planes use turbochargers and superchargers This section will belong to the chapter on flight for Forgotten Battles 9 4 Gandits effects Positive and negative Gs and their effect on the pilot For FB address their effect on the engine primarily negative Gs The oscillations are damped out because the pitch wise rotation causes the tail to ha
120. the time between instrument checks to try and remember faces of lost comrades over the last two months of your war just how many have there been You are jerked out of your thoughts by the sound of a sudden leap in the engines of the accompanying I 153s Seconds later your number two calls out Bpaxeckne uctpe6uTesn cena 54 Combat fundamentals same Of course you have been maintaining a sweeping gaze to spot enemy fighters but you have also taken your time squinting at the road running alongside that lake what s its name again searching for vehicles Wake up We re still three clicks from the target Air combat in the second World War was terrifying demanding bor ing and thrilling and required a hard life Most of us are perfectly con tent to simulate the more glorious aspects some do it more seriously with an eye on historical accuracy and immersion some more lightly with a lust for shooting something down and we all are likely to en joy a wide variety of experiences All the same regardless of whether you are hitting autopilot and 8x speed to get to the battle in an offline campaign or flying with no view assistance into an online coop with hu man opponents the basics of combat are the same As you read through this chapter keep in mind that at some point just about every topic discussed is going to become very relevant to keeping you in the sky 6 1 Gunnery I like to show off my shooting prowess
121. to the enemy pilots by carefully hitting insects that are flying near their aircraft Then if I really want to instill the fear of God in them I begin chipping away all the paint on their wings Highly im pressed the enemy then tries to duplicate my feat However the attempt is clumsy and they end up shooting off one of my wings As my chute pops open I wave and laugh at the clumsy enemy as he flies back to his base in shame And so I continue to rule the skies over Russia Letterboyl Marksmanship is one of the most valuable skills a combat pilot can have and especially fighter pilots Warplanes are essentially intended to be nothing other than mobile weapons platforms Cleverly maneu vering your plane into a firing solution on your enemy does nothing for you if you are in no danger of hitting him As a WWII combat pilot gun nery is very probably the first skill that you ought to develop after basic Enemy fighters 10 o clock high 6 1 Gunnery flight You are not likely to be as skilled as Letterboy1 at first so we ll have to set our goals a little lower and content ourselves with making holes in enemy aircraft 6 1 1 Convergence Just like every other unpowered object in a gravitational field bullets don t travel in a straight path Instead the path they follow is very close to a parabola think of that famous arch in St Louis The bullet path is much more stretched out but you get the idea they go away fro
122. torpedo the further ahead of the target you will need to release your torpedo Asis usually the case in ground attack firing from as close as possible is advantageous You are more likely to give too little offset than too much ships are deceptively speedy Skip bombing You can also try your hand at releasing heavy bombs into ships Con ventional dive bombing or mast height bombing runs are options but you can also use skip bombing If you fly as low as possible when re leasing your bomb it strikes the water surface quite obliquely and will bounce a considerable distance The technique here is similar to a clas sic torpedo run except that less offset is required as the bouncing bomb Mn fact torpedoes seem to not care about physics in IL 2 and will travel happily through the water regardless of the release height angle or speed 8 1 Ground attack will travel faster through the air after skipping than a torpedo through water When the bomb strikes the hull of the ship it will be arrested and begin sinking Set your bomb delay to zero so the bomb explodes as close to the ship as possible 8 1 3 Exiting Once you have made your attack you can concentrate on surviving your exit from the target area Anti aircraft fire is probably much more ac curate than was really the case and this is deliberate Fewer guns are needed to create a realistically dangerous flak screen thus easing the load on the game engine This means that AA
123. trim like pushing on the stick and Ctrl Down Arrow negative pulling You probably will have to use some slight forward stick pressure so fool with small trim inputs until you are satisfied that you are flying pretty level Get it to where you don t need to put any forward or backward pressure on the stick maybe just a little rudder and or side pressure on the stick Steady Good the airplane is now flying at its current trim speed Get your view to where you can see the stick the airspeed indi cator and altimeter the variometer and the horizon out the windscreen Now give in a small amount of positive elevator trim only 2 taps on the keyboard If you watch the stick you ll notice that it moved back slightly but immediately Some other things will follow the nose will go up the plane will start to climb and the airspeed will drop After the plane has more or less stopped or slowed its climb check your airspeed and give it two more clicks up After it stops or slows its climb again check your airspeed and give it still two more clicks up You ll have noticed that your airspeed has significantly dropped Maintain this airspeed for a while although the aircraft may want to lower its nose and pick back up some of the airspeed then raise the nose again and lose some of the airspeed and so on After a little while start giving clicks back down if you like and watch your nose drop and airspeed start to climb You can try variations of this
124. tude This means that within any given altitude range performance will not vary In order to make the performance in this type of sim realistic the cheat sheets get very big and have a lot of different performance char acteristics recorded For simple models it provides a huge computer performance advantage but as the performance gets more realistic the cheat sheets in the form of a table begin to take too much RAM Another approach is to use mathematical formula to calculate lift drag the effects of control inputs etc on the fly This uses much less memory as only the formulae have to be loaded but hundreds of time a second for every plane in the mission the CPU must work out the answer to every formula in use so you need a much more powerful com puter IL 2 uses this sort of method Again simple models that gloss over rarely encountered flight conditions take less computing power while models that take into account things like ground effect leading edge slats undercarriage drag change in weight and centre of gravity due to fuel and ordnance being expended will require many more calcu lations and more computing power The sim programmers must choose what level of detail will provide the most detail in the flight model without slowing the computer down so much that the game is unplayable 1t doesn t matter how fast your video card is if the computer can t tell it where the objects are often enough You ll get perfectly clear
125. us than you think In any case the theory and skills you learn here are an indispensable foundation for combat maneuvers and tactics In fact this chapter is limited to cover only the topics immediately relevant to getting an excellent start to actually flying the aircraft which is why there s a later chapter that continues with the discussion of applying these basics to combat operations Combat fundamentals introduces the various aspects of develop ing your state of mind gunnery skills awareness of environment and knowledge of the view system and how to find your location It is rele vant to both air to air and air to ground combat Fighter combat maneuvers moves on to introduce you to essential and useful maneuvers for fighters Fighters are aircraft whose purpose is to shoot other aircraft down and are to be differentiated from ground attack aircraft The majority of aircraft in IL 2 are fighter aircraft Al though many ground attack aircraft cannot even perform many of these maneuvers they can benefit from others Maneuvering is distinct from tactics and the difference will hopefully become clearer Ground attack and tactics gets into the basics of the nitty gritty world of dropping and shooting things into the mud while presenting yourself as a target to bloodthirsty defensive batteries Eventually it will also bring some of the tactics missing from the chapter on maneu vers Unfortunately this is not yet written
126. ussian unless you haven t disabled the subtitles see section 11 1 2 or you have a language pack you understand installed For full immersion always make sure you get back across enemy lines Then if you run out of fuel or your plane is hopelessly damaged and the engine quits or is about to explode you can crash land or bail If your cockpit is completely shot up or you are in a cockpit that has an obstructed view of the compass you will have to find an alternative heading indicator There are at least two possibilities here One is the speed bar located in the lower left hand side of the screen in the form of a red letters and numbers This can be be assigned a key see sec tion 10 2 and toggled on and off On the speed bar there is the entry HDG which provides the compass heading in degrees Another alterna tive is the sun During day missions this is a handy reference and hard to miss Of course at high noon it gets difficult even in western Russia The most This visual navigation is not only challenging it is absolutely a heap of fun and very satisfying after a mission Don t forget to keep an eye out for enemy planes while navigating If you find you like navigating you can create a mission for yourself to fly around and learn the area better For instance if you are in the Lvov map you can fly around until you are able to recognize towns and special rivers There are more river branches in Lvov than probably anywhere else on ea
127. ut more rapid and reliable even if you black out Here is a list of dive bombing tips It s worth setting up your controls especially for the Stuka for instance map bomb release and the airbrake to joystick buttons In Forgotten Battles if you use buttons next to each other it s easy to press both at once thus giving you simultaneous bomb release and pullout Use the sideways snap view preferably with your joystick hat button to check your dive angle with the windscreen angle mark ings the line in parallel with the horizon indicates your dive angle in degrees Remember the shallower your dive the more you will have to aim beyond your target to compensate for gravity lag When beginning dive bomb training use the key to slow the game down This gives you more time to line up and think about the bombing angle you will need Fighters do not have the advantage of dive brakes so in them try using flaps to slow and steady your dive In any case you will want to throttle back Certain flap settings might disturb your trim making a steady dive difficult or impossible or your flaps might jam if you dive too quickly so don t start the dive with a high speed Experiment to find what works for a particular aircraft This discussion has assumed a stationary target and no wind If your target is moving you will have to offset your aiming point accordingly and if there is wind you will also need to anticipate the drift of your o
128. ve a different angle of attack than the wings 9 5 Landing revisited 9 5 Landing revisited 9 5 1 Practice at altitude Describe an experiment and provide a track that demonstrates the mushiness on the back side of the power curve and how the pilot can experiment with stall speeds given varying degrees of flaps and gear ex tended The pilot should note the effect of Climb Angle of attack Pitch attitude Incidence for these conditions The pilot can also practice set ting up a 30 glide slope and managing the glide slope with throttle 9 5 2 Go around or salvage Tips on when to admit that a go around is in order Especially useful for those in coops and seeking a higher level of realism 9 5 3 Cross wind landings This should be specifically directed towards those nasty cross wind land ings in IL 2 and less real life procedures I know I stink at them Tully possibly someone else as well has offered to write up some material here 9 6 Night operations Night fighting special considerations for visibility What to be wary of What are the issues here 9 7 Techniques of formation flying Because the creator of IL 2 is evil and doesn t want you to learn how to fly you have the choice of selecting autopilot which will take over your airplane and fly you to your target with the rest of your flight Some of us rather enjoy doubling or tripling the time of each mission by flying more or less in formation with our squadmates T
129. ver flap posi tions Looking at the aircraft from an external view shows the various flap positions Flap positions 35 CHAPTER 5 Flight Maintain thine airspeed lest the ground arise and smite thee Aviation proverb Stop for a moment to consider all that you ve learned so far how to tell what is going on from the instruments and gauges starting her up and getting in position all kinds of theory about how to control airspeed and about control surfaces You ll surely want to actually go for a ride now First we need to make sure you know how to do two more things stay up in the air and change altitude Then it s a cinch to take off find your way around the sky and gently become reacquainted with the tarmac 5 1 Stalls There s an aviation adage that says takeoffs are optional and landings are sooner or later mandatory What goes up must come down This is in fact usually the scariest aspect of flight It won t surprise you then that there are basically two ways to land the way you walk away from controlled landing and the way you don t bad landing One of the Mts true In IL 2 the weak of heart can choose to start and finish in the air and have nothing to do with the ground except under tragic circumstances 38 Flight big factors influencing the type of landing you end up with is called a stall and that s why it is being covered first As a combat pilot you will have to worry about other fa
130. ward on the stick a decrease in the angle of attack The actual trim tabs of the primary control surfaces are not typi cally bent but rather pivot around a hinge in positions controlled by a mechanical system possibly by hydraulics The advantage of this me chanical system is obvious we can control the position of the primary control surfaces without having to manually put pressure on the stick We already know that the elevator is used to control the angle of attack of the airplane This means that an airplane is trimmed for angle of attack If you trim an airplane and then leave it alone it will continue to fly at a certain angle of attack This is also true of airplanes with out trim mechanisms they just aren t adjustable This is something that you should never forget Use the elevator trim to set the angle of attack Trim for angle of attack Trim for angle of attack Airsoeed depends on angle of at tack and load factor Why don t we try a simple experiment to illustrate Use the Quick Mission Builder see section 10 8 to hop into the cockpit of your fa vorite fighter For this experiment you probably won t want one whose variometer is blocked by the stick like the MiG Set it for any altitude your heart desires but give yourself at least 500m Set the throttle to about 50 and try to fly straight ahead without gaining or losing al 31 32 Ground school titude By default Ctr1 Up Arrow will provide positive elevator
131. wn aircraft 71 72 Ground pounding and fighter tactics Rockets You have no option to launch all rockets simultaneously in IL 2 and the delay between rocket launches means that ripple firing is probably not a strong option Fire one or two salvos of rockets exit observe the effects of your attack and re engage as appropriate even if that means following your cursing flight leader Just as with bullets gravity causes the trajectory of rockets to drop beginners at rocket attack often find their rockets falling short so learn to aim beyond the target The further from your target you are when you launch your rockets the more you will have to compensate for grav ity so get as close as you can without taking damage from the rocket burst yourself In a close in horizontal or shallow dive rocket attack try aiming at the roof of your target or just above it Alternatively you can choose a steep dive to lessen the effect just as in dive bombing Torpedo attack IL 2 is quite forgiving in all respects of torpedo launch Unlike a real ship which would likely maneuver to frustrate your aiming your target will maintain a steady speed and course and torpedoes nearly always run successfully as long as you fly straight as low as you can and at a steady speed Approach the target at a right angle to the course of your target with your flight path intersecting the ship s direction ahead of the ship The further away you release your
132. xample that everybody knows is the throttle slider found on almost all joysticks If you have a joystick installed the Power HOTAS control probably already says something like U Slider axis The Aileron and Elevator con trols should likewise be assigned and Rudder as well if you have a twist function on the joystick or much better rudder pedals see section In addition to these you can assign smooth continuous control to Flaps Brakes Prop Pitch and the various trims There is signifi cance in the fact that the maker of the sim chose these specific control assignments for smooth control 10 2 2 Joystick settings Tully has also offered to write some things here though he might not touch on all topics 86 IL 2 features and references 10 3 View objects This screen is useful for a few things One obvious help is to learn what the aircraft ships ground vehicles and artillery are in the game and to familiarize yourself with their external appearance Learning to distinguish between aircraft types is extremely important and for sur face attack quickly identifying ground vehicles and ships is important Artillery is less important they re not highly visible and you ll get to know them by what they throw at you Another use of this screen is the text information written for each of the objects It will help you to learn the strengths weaknesses his tory and specifications of each of the objects notably the aircraft
133. yed in flight If you try to deploy them at high speeds or gain too much speed with them deployed things will break Often what happens is the flaps get stuck in their current position As a result each aircraft 10 10High lift devices include flaps slats and slots To find out more than the introduc tory comments here have a look at Andy Bush s highly informative article Secondary Flight Controls Flaps 7 Many of these device designs are present in IL 2 but they are referred to collectively as flaps for simplicity 4 7 Secondary control surfaces has a maximum speed for the deployment of flaps Unfortunately for the time being you are left to guess what that speed is for each aircraft but with reasonable precaution it should not pose a problem The flaps on each IL 2 aircraft have four different default positions and they can be deployed in two different ways One way is to switch between the positions with keys pressing V moves the flaps down in increments and F moves them back up The four default positions are closed combat take off and landing These positions resemble the ac tual deployment positions of the aircraft and are sufficient for almost any situation The use of the individual positions will be discussed later in their appropriate contexts Should you find a reason for it the second way is to assign a slider control to the flaps in the HOTAS setup see section 10 2 1 This provides a finer degree of control o
134. you just can t wait we can recommend 17 8 3 Team tactics 8 3 1 Formation flying 8 3 2 Formations 77 CHAPTER 9 Advanced topics There are some things that you just can t get around having to know about before you can understand the most basic aspects of flight For example you can t really study how to take off or land until you know about stalls and flaps With energy we re going straight to the heart of things Before we go any further however a word to the disheartened if you don t understand some of the concepts here or just don t believe them don t worry Read on through them and absorb what you can Then go fly some and come back and read them again after you ve had some exposure 9 1 Angle of attack stability Per the chapter in Denker made practical for IL 2 Emphasis should be laid on teaching the reader how to maintain stable flight This is especially important in light of gunnery Make an example with track of approaching a bomber s six out of a climb doing it the right and wrong way 9 1 1 Changing angle of attack How to make smooth changes in airspeed and climb rates Example of leveling off from a climb 80 Advanced topics 9 1 2 Phugoid oscillations In earlier discussions about altering altitude and airspeed we have seen that the airplane does not allow you to make those changes smoothly without some stick input If from trimmed flight you change the alti tude by say pulling back on

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