Excessive Range? Imaginary Fuel?

[CPDST]

Hi There!

Yesterday I flew a rather long flight in the Spitfire 1A, a combat patrol one might say. I cruised at 26,000 feet, the propellor plunger fully in (Coarse), mixture at Auto-Rich (Ready to go to full power with the prop in case of any bandits) and throttle at full, which under my conditions gave me between 2-4 PSI of boost (let's say my altitude control over the course of the long flight wasn't great...). I noticed my endurance seemed to be rather higher than I expected: At one point when I had roughly 50 gallons of gas across the the two tanks left, and my GPH was 39, on that same popup, it said my endurance was 3Hr 40min. If I did the math I thought I should be able to fly for a little less than 1.5 hours with my remaining fuel. Then I looked at my range and it said I could go for about 880 miles. This sounded very odd, on the gas I had left, so I checked my fuel popup, and the individual tank contents looked alright, and made sense, but my total fuel was listed as being roughly 130 gallons. This was looking very odd indeed.

I did another check just before I began descending, at the the same power setting, however by then I only had 17 gallons in the bottom tank, but my endurance was roughly 2hr 20min, and my range was listed as being about 765 miles. This was even more odd.

After I landed, I did some checks on how total fuel was calculated: With both tanks empty on the fuel popup, total fuel was listed as 83 gallons. With both tanks full, fuel was listed as 85 gallons (Regular Spitfire Fuel capacity) + 83 Gallons of "imaginary fuel". I believe this unusable, imaginary fuel was to blame for my erroneous range and endurance readings.. Could you please investigate and let me know?

Just for the record, I'm running Accusim core update V1.5.1, on FSx Acceleration, the FSx automixture box is unticked, and I never use time acceleration, and I always start from the default flight, if that still makes a difference.

Regards,
Craig.

[Eric.]

I think I noticed something odd when I was flying my Spitfire. With both tanks full, if I hit CTRL+Z a couple times where it would show total fuel, it was not at 100%. Nowhere close, actually. Something in the fuel configuration might be odd due to Accusim, and therefore possible to use the Fuel and Payload menu within FSX to put in more fuel than the A2A payload configuration does?

[Gypsy Baron]

If I remember correctly, the fuel system, tankage, etc, on the Accusim planes
is done 'outside of FSX'. This means one should NOT use the FSX load manager
on these aircraft. Only the A2A load manager.

Also, the Ctrl + Z display MAY not be accurate as a result. Rely only upon
the data presented in the A2A 2D panels and tool-tip readouts.

I'm not sure what may have been the issue with the phantom 83 gallons and
I am currently far from my sim computer so can't investigate this for at least
another 10 days.

Hopefully one of the A2A Spitfire experts will check in to this thread and can
get to the bottom of this (fuel tank)

Paul

[Eric.]

I'm suggesting that it was filled outside of the A2A popup fuel/payload manager and that somehow allowed it to have way more fuel.

[CPDST]

HIi Eric, Paul,

I always use the A2A Popups for payload and refueling - apart from the fact that they're much nicer to use than the FSx fuel and payload manager, the A2A manual says never to load fuel and payload from the default manager, so I don't.

I hope somebody from A2A does see this, it would be interesting see what the (possible) causes are. I just hope it's not a corrupted .DAT file, I would rather like to keep my Spitfire hours..

Craig.

[CPDST]

Hello there...?

Does any body from A2A have any wise words of wisdom to offer..?

Craig.

[Killratio]

Craig,

Yes there can be some funny things happening with the Shift 2 calculations occasionally. It is being looked into.

Darryl