Taildragger won't steer on the ground

I have a downloaded Bristol Beaufighter (complete with torpedo) that flies without difficulty, lands and takes off under control too. On the ground it is very difficult to steer and tends to take up most of the available ground space to turn, using a combination of rudder and differential brakes.

I have tried tailwheel lock/unlock using shift/G but this has no effect at all. Does anybody else have similar problems? :(

it probably only has a castor - just a loose wheel. to turn you'll have to use the difficult procedure of differential braking using f11 and f12.

Agreed.

Hey Aldeeb, good to see you're still tweaking and coaxing your vintage aircraft - I wish I had your patience.

Have you tried to increase the value of differential_braking_scale =- just an idea. You'll find it in the aircraft.cfg under [brakes].

This section is straight out of the default DC-3:

If this variable doesn't exist in your Bristol Beaufighter's aircraft.cfg you could try adding it and go on a TTD (that's a Taxi Test Drive [patent pending] ) and see what happens.

Good luck!

I had tried both differential braking and the rudder without any turning effect worth mentioning.

After my abortive attempt to turn the Beau I switched to another TD (Anson) and that steered perfectly ok.

Bit of a mystery!

Hi.. I noticed in your email responses, one of them said you were landing with no problem. I have the Bristol Beaufighter with torpedo and I have having an awful time trying to land it without it bouncing all over the place. I have tried everything in order to land without the bounce to no avail. The Beaufighter I downloaded was the file name B_Fighter_TFX.zip. So perhaps you might tell me if we are using the same airfraft.cfg file and the same aircraft and if you are experiencing the same problem.

Thanks

George (w3cpr)

I all and thanks for your inputs. I don't have the Readme for the one I'm using but found this origin in the Panel:

Kazunori Ito
KzIT16643VT@aol.com

This might help the last posting and sorry I can't do better than that.

Hi Taildragger, yes the ancients fit in well with my age (80) as I actually saw many of the specimens I am able to fly in Sim. Visited the Bristol factory in 1942 and I was able to examine the aircraft very closely. Also visited the Manchester Avro factory in 1943 and boarded "Lancaster" aircraft being built. My first exposure to any aircraft was in 1939 at an Air Show at Ringway airport (now Manchester International) when we had a "Lysander" demonstrate slow flying and the pilot overdid it, stalling into a fatal crash. During the years 1943-5 I was in naval college and we had quite a few "friendly near misses" - Spitfire, Mustang and Oxford all crashed far too close to us and a USAAF Thunderbolt pilot thought he would scare us Limeys by power diving at our early morning parade - he blew up and scattered bits of the aircraft, himself and the munitions he was carrying all over the countryside. Quite alarming for us and the neighbouring Rookery too. The earliest I ever got to fly was also in this period when we were instructed on Tiger Moth trainers - not surprisingly a specimen is on my pc and a joy to fly.

Since then my life has been as a passenger or spectator and even this has produced interesting moments - like the late afternoon flight out of Caribbean French St Martin (Grand Case), with an overloaded Navajo - no wind and very hot. I was in the co-pilots seat and watched the end of the 3000 ft runway rushing towards us after the pilot tried to rotate and only the nose wheel came unstuck. He put it down again and we lifted off with absolutely no more runway visible, the salt pond very close and we cleared the perimeter fence with inches to spare; we then had to get altitude to clear a hill's saddle of about 500 ft! My toes were itching to hit the toe brakes! Happy days.

try the defferential brakes by using pressing F11 or F12, or other ways!

I have found occassionally that the assignment key command is missing even knowing what it should be. If you haven't, check assignment to be sure the lock tailwheel command is in fact there as it should be.

Other than that, check the aircraft cfg file for a disabled command there, not likely but worth a check if all else isn't finding anything.

Good luck.

Knothead