CEM Hurricane Vibration and Smoke
 

Hey everyone!

I have been following these forums for quite some time now and there's quite a few people with tons of good advice, so I am hoping to get it on this as well:

When flying in the Hurricane and CEM+Temp Effects enabled, I do find it particularly hard to get everything set at altitudes above roughly 10000 ft. At first, the airplane starts to vibrate occasionally with small clouds of black smoke coming out of the exhausts, as altitude increases so does the vibration and the smoke. In addition, at some point the a/c will not climb more than ~700-1000 ft/min at all. That is quite a deviation from the specs in the manual.

Perfectly trimmed (as far as possible within the game at least), I can squeez out roughly the speed shown in the manual for the variant with the variable pitch prop (still a bit lower though), but once again with terrible vibration. On the CSP variant, I bearly manage to make it up to 476 km/h no matter what I do, once again with horrible vibration.

It does seem to be an issue with the mixture apparently but that leaves the question how the RL Hurricane could have a ceiling of 11000m afaik. Also, if you think about it, operating altitudes during the BoB ranged from 16 -20k feet for the german bombers, how could they ever fly let alone shoot at that altitude with that vibration!?

On the other hand, I do find the engine management particularly easy and fool-proof below 10k ft, you have to do a lot wrong to actually do some damage or fall out of the best performance envelope.

Just to clarify it, I do understand the principles of engine management and how everything is supposed to work in R/L, as I do have a private license.

So either it is me missing something or some bug in the engine management system causing this, any help appreciated. :confused:

Cheers,

H.

PS: During these tests, I noticed there is a complete lack of contrails (at least up to 22k ft.), what's up with that?

Apparently, this is buggy to some point.

I just did another quick test, this time in the 109. At some point (~3000 meters) the plane started to vibrate (all temperatures in manual specified range) and even spat out a few clouds of black smoke.

Also (same as on the Hurricane), when the engine was pulled back to idle, the vibration would stop.

Kept climbing to around 6000 meters where the vibration got so bad that I decided I had enough.

Went into a prolonged dive, always keeping the temperatures at the same level. As soon as I went below ~3000 meters the vibration was gone, no more smoke or anything. Running smooth up (and quite a bit beyond) maximum performance specified in the manual.

Also, in neither of the two tests there was damage visible on the post-flight screen.

Test conducetd on the cross-boarders flight and on freeflight france.

Contrails at 22000 feet? Sounds low to me.

Are you leaning the mixture enough at 10000 ft? (I dont have CoD yet, soon though)

Supercharger? Is there any on the hurri?

Yep mixture is set to auto-weak (the lowest possible setting even) and everything is looking fine as far as the setup goes. Temperatures are well in range and as I said, you don't get a damage result from flying like that. It also happens on the 109 that auto adjusts the mixture inflight anyways.

Doubled checked with a squadmate who is also getting the same.

Apparently the tolerances for the engine cutout are set to low on the Merlin engine, forcing a cutout on even the slightest 0.x G manouvers, but that only seems to be part of the problem.

As far as I know, the Mk. I was equiped with a single speed supercharger, so nothing to adjust there. Planes fitted with the newer Mk.XX Merlin engine were designated Hurricane Mk.IIs, along with changes/variations to the armament and the wing.

With the contrails I was referring to no contrails at all (at least not that I noticed any) up to altitudes of 27.8 k feet, the highest I got so far in the Hurri. That is by the way quite a bit higher the auto managed Hurricane likes to get (CEM off) comfortably.

I have been unable to fly Hurricanes Spitfires or Messerschmidt above 21000ft.

The first thing is the hurricane mixture control lever. In real life it is rich aft lean forward. against the convention. If you look closely you can see a little sign in the cockpit...rich -> aft.

In game the DH hurricane is lean aft and rich forward and the rotol hurricane is rich aft lean forward...confusing! The throttle is supposed to push the mixture to rich when you close the throttle but this is buggy in both hurri.

Apart from that issue, the auto rich setting should lean the mixture at altitude without the pilot doing anything. But the engine vibrates and blows smoke like it's running too rich.
I wonder if this is supposed to correlate with Full Throttle Height. About 18000ft or so in a hurricane. So maybe we have to progressively reduce the throttle the higher we go over FTH. Even doing that there is no way I can approach 30000ft which a hurricane mk1 could supposedly do.
But my understanding of full throttle height is sketchy to say the lest.

The 109 has auto mixutre so there is nothing you can do except lowering throttle and/or prop pitch. but you have to lower them to idle to stop the vibration...

I love the complex engine management but it maybe has a few bugs to iron out yet...
The first time I flew a ju87 across the channel bombed a Dover radar( missed actually) and flew home with out breaking my engine was very satisfying indeed!

Yes also can confirm what the OP reports. It appears CEM is very buggy at the moment with mixture/auto-mixture hopefully it will be addressed in tomorrow's patch.

Well, as per my understanding, one can leave the mixture lever on "auto rich" in Hurris and Spits. lean, or "weak" as mentinoed in the pilots notes is used for high alt cruising to conserve fuel. Leaving it on auto rich should be fine for every altitude as it's supposed to be automatic.

And also, I can confirm that high up I can't fly the planes either, and not because I don't know how things work.

Oh, it's a bug?

Good to know. I thought I did something wrong. (109)

I too can't fly the 109 anywhere above 3000m without killing my engine. Even with less than 1.1 ata and 2000rpm and wide open radiators + oil cooler, there's no chance to prevent the engine from getting damaged. Below I've no problems expect some relatively rare "stutters" from the engine. Seems it's impossilbe to run it aboslutely calm, but at least it doesn't die down low. Can fly from Dover to London and back again without a single sign of a damaged engine at 2000m or below. The only thing that seems to be damaged is my crappy graphics card that can barely run CoD even at low settings where the landscape looks far worse than Il-2 on low :D