The Talent Company Limited 'Enterprise II' Airship.
Generic modern Goodyear style airship with vectored thrust.
The flight dynamics were arrived at through trial and error and are mine with a lot of help from Ian Radcliffe. I do have to say that they WERE based upon the fantastic work of Bill Lyons and TBH, the realistic airship behaviour is really down to him. Thanks Bill.
FS can't really simulate airships properly but this gets pretty close with a little help from a sneaky little application of flaps for takeoff and landing. She won't loop, roll, or stall either, which is half way to reality. She also reacts to gusts in a most realistic way.
Installing:
Easy, just drop the EnterpriseII folder into your main Aircraft folder. Manufacturer is listed as Unreal Aviation rather than 'The Talent Company Limited' as I wouldn't want to confuse you, besides which, I haven't finished the novel.
FS2002 users must move the Unreal folder out of the Panel folder into their default Gauges folder, overwriting if prompted to do so.
Flying:
Cycle through the cockpit views at least once to activate the gauges. This will ensure that the nose rope is animated and that the aircraft will 'sit' at the correct attitude in cruise.
Start your engines with CTRL E. This will get them both up and running. The sounds are aliased to the Mooney Bravo but you might want to change this for something more suitable. I recommend the excellent sounds supplied with Bill Lyons' Skyship 600 as these are perfect.
Select full flap to position the ducted fans to the takeoff position and then firewall the throttle. You can lose the flaps incrementally or all at once depending upon how you feel but in either case you will climb smartly.
Best cruise is at 50kts. Rate of climb is very good but for realism you would stay below 4000 feet and normal operational height would be 1000-2500 depending upon the barometric pressure, gas temperature and whether you have a full load.
She will cruise all day at 50kts or you can slow right down to 7-5kts (with flap) and hover in a light breeze. Try landing on top of a building (M$ ones are hardened for this - crash-detection must be switched on), it's fun.
Auto-rudder /ON is fine if you don't want to make rudder-only turns. The ailerons are there, this being FS you can't remove 'em, but they are not effective at turning the airship at all s'there.
In turbulence, she will pitch and roll and generally gets chucked about. Just like the real thing. :-)
On cross-countries, it helps if the wind is going your way.
Landing an airship is a little different from the default Cessna as you 'drive' it down. Once trimmed in a nose-down attitude, reduce throttle to keep the speed around 30-40 knots.
Add flaps as and when/if you need 'em. it is possible to hover in a light wind. Vectored thrust takes all the work out of landing a modern airship and your ground crew can be as few as two people. On touchdown you can apply the parking brake and lose the flaps if the wind starts to tip you back! You might want to lose any flaps as you shut off your engines to help prevent being blown about. Parking crosswind can help here too but remember they didn't keep 'em in ruddy great sheds when it was windy for nothing.
Note: As always, I have included an autopilot so that the aircraft will follow FSNavigator tracks as I like to sit in the tower and watch her drifting around above my head etc.
If the aircraft seems to have a mind of its own, check that you haven't left the AP on from a previous aircraft. Press Z to toggle the AP. The same applies to Autothrottle. If the engines won't respond press CTRL SHIFT R to toggle the AT.
If you hate the AP then edit the Aircraft.cfg file to remove it.
She is lit up at night and carries the standard set of navigation lights. The searchlight (landing light) under the nose tilts if you press the "/" key and it also turns with the rudder. The nose rope will curve back as you gain speed too.
Thanks to Ian Radcliffe for taking the time to flight test this aircraft for FS9 and helping to create the right flight dynamics for both FS2002 and FS9. This meant that I didn't need to upload two sets of files.
That's it. I'm quite pleased with it but I'm open to comments, especially from our chief BETA Tester... ;-)
Kevin Bryan
Unreal Aviation
whirlybug@cix.co.uk
Please note that emails to this address must be in plain text only and must not contain attachments of any sort otherwise they will be automatically nuked and I won't see them.
