What does feathering do? I see it as a bind one can use but I don't know what it does

And yes mine is backwards as well. I liked the old one.

If I understand your question correctly; What is prop feather? The answer is you turn the blades so that the propeller blade airfoil chord is paralell to the airstream, they produce the minimal amount of drag possible, and prevents the propeller windmilling. Picture this: you hold your hand flat out of the window of a moving car, if you hold your hand vertically, you will feel the force of the drag very well, but if you tilt your hand so it's horizontal, there's a lot less drag.

That is what prop feathering does to your propellers. You adjust the blades angle to produce the minimum amount of drag possible. Typically used for gliding after engine loss, or generally on multi-engine aircraft to lessen drag caused by an engine loss.

In modern day airplanes, often the engines start with the prop in feathered position to avoid creating thrust.

In german I believe the prop-pitch panel is marked "Segel-something" and means "Sailplane" mode sortof and intended for gliding incase of an engine stop.

I love how the change in the PP setting mode (why was it changed anyway? Is the change to the current method historically correct?) spawned one major bug and at least two awkward-feeling issues - PP setting the other way around and being waay too slow. Talk about development cycles :rolleyes:
Who is that guy luthier talked about *doing bad things to him* ? :eek:

On a side note: the PP slider having 3 positions for actuating in both directions and leaving it alone may properly represent things now, but it really shouldn't be that way on the 109's water radiator slider. I mean, you use the crank to change it and there is nothing which snaps back to neutral or something. The slider should show the water rad's position, as it currently does on the oil radiator slider.

+1 This makes no sense. Probably an overlooked GUI design flaw...

This method historically correct, except that the switch has four positions, not three (feather mode is missing now), and 1°-1.5°/second should be its velocity, not 0,3°/s. The speed was good before the hotfix, i don't know what happened.

The small icons (engine info window) signal it only, what you know without it being necessary to look down onto the panels. Your hand on the gas arm, you feel it what his position. Oil radioator is the same. As opposed to these, the water radiator arm you don't know, even if you grab it (it may turn two and quarter times round.). It is necessary to look out onto the wing, the indicator what shows.
The new Prop pitch method causes the same one. The position of the switch does not reveal the accurate value, you must to look at the instrument.

Thank you everyone! Very informative and very interesting.

Quick fix. Reverse your current keybindings for Increase Prop Pitch and Decrease Prop pitch.
Save as a new profile. When you fly the 109 or 110 load this profile. For all other types then load your default profile. Doing this all looks and behaves the same.

Profiles can be loaded on the fly.

I'm getting the same RPMs as before the patch for each combination of power/airspeed/prop pitch, it just takes much longer to change the pitch.

I think the clock is not for selecting a desired setting to which the prop will catch up, to me it seems the clock just tells you what the actual setting is currently. At least that's the way it works on my end.

Kurfurst's recommendations are good. Adding a feathering lock and making the pitch change match a historically correct rate of degrees of pitch change per second, along with correcting the reversal of the controls, would pretty much fix it once and for all.

Yeh they have fixed the cockpit animation of the switch, so up is now fine etc, but they seem to have forgotten to match the joystick movement to this change, so lever back for me is coarse in a spit and spit lever goes back, but same control movement gives fine pitch in a 109, and is reverse to what you see animated.

Yeh, I have no idea how fast it should go, but it makes it hard to keep your energy up in a DF, as you cant change pitch fast enough now by the time you have it set for a climb your in a dive etc, other than the speed if its wrong and the reversed controls its great, as you say fix those two issues and it's another issue of the long list of issues they are working on.