Its better to be Good than Lucky.

Just a quick post on fixing little things when they go wrong. :pilot:

I'm not new to FS but I am new to FS9 and am mostly finished installing planes and scenery on this build.

I have a bunch of carriers and NAS FOLS practice zones set up and all of a sudden things went slightly crazy with Arrcab2.6.

I could "trap" with no problem. Now don't be hatin', I'm just that good :pilot: (seriously, I've been doing this longer than I should admit). The small problem was that, suddenly, I couldn't get the cat to launch me. Set up in a "cat" zone with no issues and set the parking brake, order a cat shot with and get the "armed" message, run up full power and release the brake and.... nothing. :eek: No kick, just normal acceleration as the end of the flight deck rolled by-slowly. And, the kicker was that it worked just fine the day before. :confused:

So, something must have changed. Right?

OK, I start to think about what I changed recently. I added some aircraft. I added some scenery and ai. I also did some tweaking to the sensitivity and null zone for my stick. What else? Oh yeah, I goofed around with some compatibility settings just to check them out! THAT had to be it! Jump to the chase, no that was not it. :p OK, I added some new trap zones to Arrcab. Since I had no issues trapping, maybe it was the higher number of trap zones that did me in? Load up a back-up and no joy. Same problem.

OK, time to back track some more. I tried un-doing some of the other changes I had made and still no luck. OK, what about tweaking the stick controls? It shouldn't have mattered, I was getting full throttle, wasn't I?

Turns out I wasn't, it just felt like it. 94% N1 didn't feel much different but it just wasn't enough to trigger the catapult.

So, I guess there's a moral to the story, somewhere. Don't always trust in being lucky, sometimes its better to test everything after you change anything.

:pilot:

I've had this same issue a few years back on my Waikato carrier and in the end it turned out to be that the relatively small 3D geographically positioned catapult sensitive deck area (Cat zone as you call it) had somehow (been) moved.

In my Carrier Operations (COPS by Rob Barendregt) system, it remains necessary to get the nose wheel exactly in this small catapult area and only then will you get catapulted off the deck when you release the brakes.

My trapping area was also influenced but because this is much larger than the catapult sensitive area, this was not immediately noticed.

The whole problem (and many others) was caused by a "magnetic North deviation update" which I had found somewhere and had installed. Needless to say but I reverted back to the original file rather pronto.

Could something like this also be your problem ?

Good luck.

Hans

Could something like this also be your problem ?

 

Good luck.

 

Hans

Nope, it was just me tweaking the sensitivity and null zone for my throttle so it looked better in the VC view.

I could play around with it again, then recalibrate the throttle, but that sounds like a lot of effort for minimal gain. ;)

In other words, "If it already works-don't try to fix it". :pilot: