YSFlight Headquarters

So I tried Santa's Sleigh, and I found some surprising flight characteristics. If anyone is going to have a go at flying the Sleigh (I'm using the one in the Taskforce 58 pack) here are a few pointers:

• Using 20% thrust is about all you need to get off the ground.
• The takeoff speed of the sleigh is as low as 65-70kts.
• Don't go below 60kts or you'll get into a permanent stall, floating in the sky
• Under 100% normal "military" power, the sleigh will reach mach 1.0 and then drop to 0kts, if you're lucky you will get back to speed before crashing. (reason unknown).
• If you activate the afterburner, this process of accellerating to mach 1.0 and halting results in the sleigh exploding. My advice: don't use A/B.
• There is no spoiler, the flaps don't cause drag either. Descending from 1000ft for landing can add 100knots to your speed if you aren't careful.
• There is no reverse thrust. Trying to land on a "rooftop" would therefore prove tricky.
• Flying the circuit at 500ft, 80kts, should be slow enough to land without gaining too much speed on descent to the runway.

I'm using the YSFlight 2011 version for Linux, so if these errors don't occur with other versions of YSFlight, please chime in with your results.

acf492 wrote:[*]There is no reverse thrust. Trying to land on a "rooftop" would therefore prove tricky.

Good point. I'll add in a strong reverse thrust function to the DAT later. Maybe (no promise though) even modify the DNM to have Santa pulling on the reins as if he is getting the reindeers to stop.

I'm not familiar with 3d modeling, but if you add Santa pulling the reins, that would be really neat.

Adding reverse thrust to the DAT is a synch. I look forward to the changes for next season (you've got lots of time!)

In my opinion, the most important thing to add is drag or spoiler drag. I had a really tough time keeping the speed down for landing without.

Further to the "supersonic halt" I just tried this offline instead of online to see if it still happens. Found that it varies with altitude: at 30,000ft with A/B, you can get up to 3.5Mach before dropping down to about 0.5Mach. At this height no altitude is lost when the "halt" occurs.
At approx 21000ft with A/B, you can hit 2.6Mach, but my experiment ended because I ended up splashing in the water instantly.

I know that this is not a simple fix, but a result of several values in the DAT file, combined together in an unexpected way by the YSFlight binary. This is just for pilot's information.