Plenty of fighter jets can go over Mach 2 with little issue. In SimplePlanes, this isn’t quite the case from what I’ve seen. Reaching those speeds, even with monstrously powerful engines, can be challenging.
Now, maybe this is just situational. Many of those top speeds for fighters are stated at “high altitude”, but even still it seems as though sea level speeds are hard to match.
Is SimplePlanes aerodynamics that unrealistic, or are these fighters really just that finely tuned for ideal performance than anything short of them cannot keep up even with twice the power?
Examples:
FM-195A “ShortStack - 300 kN Dry, 400 kN Wet
Edit Note: ~1025 km/h @ ~45m Dry, ~1185 km/h @ ~45m Wet (controls too sensitive to keep level, much variance in exact altitude). ~1250 km/h @ ~12300m Dry,
XGP-52 “Cross-Bolt” - 90 kN (note: other than a mirroring mistake giving it two guns, it was accidentally left with semi-symmetric wings, which probably doesn’t help).
Neither craft, especially the “Cross-Bolt”, are very fast. ESPECIALLY the “Cross-Bolt”.
Further examples of slow planes:
F-225 “Turn-Tail” - 300 kN
Note: ~1100 km/h @ ~45m (hard to keep perfectly level due to balance). Just shy of 1400 km/h TAS @~13200m.
GV-3 “Bundle” - 300 kN
@ZeroWithSlashedO Yeah that was a surprise lol.
But those are afterburning. As far as I'm aware the fighter turbofan (who actually calls engines by their names in this game?) doesn't simulate afterburners.
Granted, they're already terribly fuel inefficient, though how so compared to an actual afterburner is beyond me.
But yeah, adding an afterburner can add even more thrust.
@Graingy
believe it or not, it's still.underpowered compared to the F119, which is the F-22's engines.
@ZeroWithSlashedO The engines are definitely something, that’s for sure. The fighter turbofan is an absolute monster.
you're not wrong
sp drag is extremely overestimated, I found this out myself when I was switching to a different engine power method.
I think this is because when you make a pure non xml edited aircraft, they tend to be very light, and their engines tend to be very overpowered, so naturally they have a huge TWR, and so the drag is supposed to be huge to compensate for the overexaggerated TWR.
Idk, my theory might be wrong
@TheFlightGuySP Ah, got it.
@Graingy I meant it in the context of form-wise. I don't see anything in particular that would cause them to have unusually high drag.
@TheFlightGuySP Yeah I can't help myself. I have no design sense despite the years.
(Game-wise refers to function or form? Which is which?)
@Graingy I think game-wise, they look okay. Design-wise they're a bit blunt/bulky in certain aspects (fuselage being rather wide for its length, or wings being a tad large).
@TheFlightGuySP Noted.
Do the designs linked specifically look problematic? That is, like the game would be doing a bad job with them?
@Graingy Usually inaccuracy. Although there also tends to be parts on aircraft that really don't need their drag calculated because other parts are already doing that for them (for example: custom airfoil shells should have their drag completely zeroed and disabled, as the wings inside already take care of drag).
SimeplePlanes does an okay job of determining when to cancel out another part's drag when another is in the way. Unfortunately it has a tendency to freak out on builds with more parts, and some parts will have absurdly high drag compared to the rest.
@TheFlightGuySP You mention drag. Is that due to SimplePlanes drag being inaccurate, or poor design? Are these especially unaerodynamic forms?
The drag points on these aircraft are rather high, especially the FM-195.
The ideal performance range for an aircraft of this size would probably be 1000dp-2000dp.
SimplePlanes drag is weird. Disable drag (and drag calculations for a slight performance boost) on parts that don't need it, and lower it on parts with higher drag until you find the ideal performance zone.
Somewhat off-topic, but because engine behavior is also kind of weird, having FT engine inputs to control power output depending on altitude can help a lot with performance (keeping the aircraft from going too fast at low altitudes, and reasonably boosting speed at higher altitudes).