Braking in the wet

[BAW019]

Hi Peter,

I was just looking at a posting over on the VATSIM forums about braking in the wet. It made me wonder it's possible to add new offsets to FSUIPC to simulate the ground speed of the left, right and centre wheels. There don't seem to be any currently and by comparing these to the aircraft's ground speed and 'On The Ground' flag we could detect skidding and get our cockpits to react accordingly. The all-important bit would be to have the wheel's gound speed reduced by braking, precipitation type and rate, runway surface (ice?) so that in really cruddy conditions we skid right off the runway!!

Just a thought, hope you don't mind!

All the best

Ian

[Pete Dowson]

I was just looking at a posting over on the VATSIM forums about braking in the wet. It made me wonder it's possible to add new offsets to FSUIPC to simulate the ground speed of the left, right and centre wheels. There don't seem to be any currently and by comparing these to the aircraft's ground speed and 'On The Ground' flag we could detect skidding and get our cockpits to react accordingly.

For FSX, SimConnect has variables for these, a read-out in RPM. I could provide them for reading. You'd need to know the wheel radii to convert that to groundspeed to see if they were skidding, though. How you'd "simulate" anything I'm not sure -- there's no way to control to RPM except presumably by braking, so I'm not sure what you mean.

Have you looked at Thomas Richter's autobrake simulation package at all? http://www.technical-service-richter.de/

The all-important bit would be to have the wheel's gound speed reduced by braking, precipitation type and rate, runway surface (ice?) so that in really cruddy conditions we skid right off the runway!!

You can't influence the wheel rotation directly. And unless you are viewing the wheels from outside you'd not notice it in any case. You'd need to create such effects by altering things like braking, groundspeed, position and so on. It's the effects you need to create, not the visual wheel rotation, surely?

I can supply FSX wheel RPMs if useful, but i don't see how they'd help you. I think they're really intended for EICAS synoptics in 777 and 747s and Airbuses.

Regards

Pete

[BAW019]

Hi Peter,

I think I stirred up my my own pond by talking about the wheel speed. Forget the wheels - I'm interested in degraded brake performance which I guess needs to be simulated inside FSUIPC - not something us users can realistically implement.

Where I was heading with this was that in FS you can hit the ground hard and fast and in the wet but so long as you're lined up you'll stop as if the ground was dry tarmac. If the braking force passed to FS was reduced by simplified environmental factors (runway surface, rain or ice) then if we stand on the brakes FSUIPC may only pass on say 5% of the applied braking force to FS, which would result in a much longer roll out, simulating skidding or aquaplaning.

I'm not too interested in sliding sideways - rather contrarily FS simulates that already if you hit the ground too fast in a crab - but it would be great to land in a tropical storm, hit the brakes and find that the plane's stopping power is seriously degraded by the conditions.

Best!

Ian

[Pete Dowson]

I'm interested in degraded brake performance which I guess needs to be simulated inside FSUIPC - not something us users can realistically implement.

Well, I don't think really it is FSUIPC's job, but a nice project for a utility or gauge. FSUIPC provides the tools -- the brakes can be disconnected by FSUIPC and controlled by program. Did you look at Thomas Richter's work in this area -- I gave you a link?

Regards

Pete