Undocumented failure modelling

[Dozer]

I just wanted to say how pleased I am by the way you can trip the Falco's undercarriage circuit breaker by pulling too many g.

For as long as I can remember, every time I press G in any flight simulator, the undercarriage will unfailingly go down. The only exception I've seen up to now is in Il-2 Sturmovik, where in rare cases you could get damage to the normal u/c system and you'd have to hit whatever you'd bound to 'manually lower gear' 60 times instead. But in every civil sim, there's no point in even looking for the green lights - if you've pressed G, you can guarantee that your gear is down.

But the wholly undocumented (in-sim - I guess in real life this feature is prominently mentioned in the manual and probably on cockpit placards!) fact that you can accidentally break the u/c system in-flight means that when you're flying the Falco, you really need to check that those green lights are on - just like real pilots can't assume that just cause they've moved a lever, the system's done what they want.

And better still, because Tom's included this facet of realism in the Falco, and left it undocumented for us to find, leaves us with paranoia about all the other systems on the Falco, even if they don't have any similar failures modelled! I just changed the VOR frequency. The display is indicating the new frequency, and the HSI is picking up a VOR. But did the tuner really change? Can't trust the display on this a/c, better go to the audio panel and listen to the VOR's morse ident! Even if, in fact, the nav radios have no hidden surprises, because the gear selector is unreliable, I can't trust the nav radios. Or the fuel gauges. Or the gyro-compass. Or anything else where Tom could have conceivably caused something 'fun' to happen if I take a shortcut or mishandle the aircraft.

This is enhanced by the presence of all those circuit breakers. I don't think there's any chance that the ADF will short-circuit and I'll need to pull its circuit breaker to get the other electrical systems back online - but the presence of the ADF circuit breaker means that I can't be sure.

This 'realistic uncertainty' really contributes to the illusion that I'm operating a real aircraft, a complex bundle of interacting systems in a streamlined aluminium (or wooden) case, rather than just making numbers change from 0 to 1 and back again inside my CPU.

And, if some bug causes my flight to end in some bizarre way, I'm less likely to blame X-Plane or my system or the aircraft's modelling, but instead there is doubt that I'd made a mistake somewhere and caused the system to break. Even if the system isn't that complex and it really was just a bug...

There's an excellent article I read a while ago, talking about creating suspense in horror films and games. I don't watch those kinds of films or play those kinds of games, but the article's still 100% relevant to systems simulation in flight simulators. Example: the film Psycho, the lead character played by the biggest-name actress gets killed really early in the film. And by killing what the audience had supposed was the star of the film, the author's established that anyone can die, which creates suspense about all the other characters. Something like that has happened with the Falco and the high-g gear breaking, I think! I found a copy of the article, it's quite old and this is from an archiving website. If you like it, I suggest you save it on your hdd. http://sirlin.dreamhosters.com/archive/suspense/ That author (Sirlin) has written a bunch of other interesting stuff, often on the topic of writing and competitive fighting games (Street Fighter etc) but applicable to a huge amount of seemingly unrelated fields!

So, thanks Tom for including that easter egg in the Falco! And for not submitting to the temptation to trumpet it in the manual, marketting videos etc - 'look how realistic my aircraft is, you can overload the u/c actuator circuit!' - which would spoil the illusion that any other system could break in similar ways!