Per-plane tweaks

[charon]

There are a bunch of minor adjustments that might be made on a real plane. For example:

• Convergence of guns.
• Bendable trim tabs that can only be adjusted by a mechanic on the ground.
• Mirrors might be adjusted. For instance, a quick glance at a real Spitfire mirror will reveal holes on the side of the faring so that it can be loosened and adjusted.

Convergence will no doubt be configurable in game, but for the others, sim developers typically just pick a value. But sometimes these values aren't what the player wants: for example, the new IAR 80 in BoX feels heavy on one wing, and the mirror feels too low. In real life, I'd tell my crew chief to fix both.

I suggest making this sort of parameter configurable. It can be as simple as a .INI file with a section for each plane.

Edited March 17 by charon

[CPT Crunch]

The game has to try and track trajectories of every single bullet fired during multiplayer, if all of a sudden every individual aircraft's multiple guns has each it's own unique trajectory table to calculate its not likely happening on the machines of our lifetime.  Ditto's for hard trim, it has to be managed uniform across the board for each type aircraft or positional flight data quickly becomes unmanageable in multiplayer.  Mirror's could be done on the local machine only, no one cares where your looking, it's not a multiplayer critical item, no positional data need be sent or tracked.  You could do these things but I'm betting it could only be a single player sim in the end.

[Tex01]

Aces high has had convergence options for fighters and attack aircraft 200 out to 600 by 25 yards increments for years. Each aircraft can be set and saved individually, along with seat position and views. I don’t think that should be an issue and should be standard. 

Back to the Aces High settings for example on a P-51, F4U or F6F  I can set the outermost guns to 375, the middle set to 350 and the innermost to 325 if I wanted or all to the same convergence.

Planes like the 109 you can set the cowl mgs separate from the nose canon. 

[Major Lee]

Strike Fighters modeled gun convergence around 2004(?) with the P51 in "Wings over Israel". SF subsequently had a wide variety of prop planes with wing guns introduced. You can easily adjust convergence, and yes, you can watch the tracers cross in front of you, and all rounds fly off on different trajectories. You can see the rounds fly until tracer burnout. I had a P47 on a previous installation where I adjusted the inner pairs of guns to converge at 250 yards and the outer pairs for 350 yards. SF ran quite well on the systems of the day, and yes, individual trajectories were modeled in a standard atmosphere based on altitude and actual ballistics. One might reasonably assume that a modern sim and PC could model the same thing that was done on Intel Core 2 Duo 3ghz CPUs and GTS550-TIs...