Altitude and Speed

[RogerSmith]

how can I figure out the optimal altitude for the aircraft's top speed while flying?

[MAKO69]

how can I figure out the optimal altitude for the aircraft's top speed while flying?

That depends on what your flying some go faster high up some down low. That sounds like a test session with the planes you fly.

[+streakeagle]

For a lot of supersonic jet aircraft, the optimum altitude is 11 km or 36,000 feet... which is where the atmosphere temperature stabilizes until you go insanely higher. However, aircraft performance may also be limited by heating effects that are reduced by going higher to reduce air density. The F-15 is an aircraft whose performance increases up to about 45,000 feet. Because the game flight model may not reflect reality, and in fact has some artificial limits to keep players from exceeding published performance due to limits not modeled in the game, the only way to be sure is to perform flight testing.

 

To save time, you can save a mission that starts in the air and edit the start altitude, speed, and fuel weight (i.e. full or 1/2 are the standards) to find the limits more quickly. I would start with 5,000 foot samples (i.e. sea level, 5,000 feet, 10,000 feet, etc.) Ideally, performance will fall off as you exceed 36,000 feet (or approach the aircraft's ceiling). But due to the design of the stock flight models and/or flight engine limitations, you may find some aircraft achieve max speed at their ceiling. Once you see the speed drop off, you can 1/2 your way in between sample points, until you get an answer to the level of precision you want.

 

A long time ago, I had released a tool that could plot the 1g flight performance for the aircraft based on reading the flight model data from the aircraft's data ini file. But a major bug had cropped up in the final release that I never tracked down and the game has changed quite a bit since then, so it wouldn't necessarily interpret the current data ini files correctly (not to mention the fact that it can't read unicode, the encoding format of SF2 text files). I did develop a program capable of reading the unicode files, but lack the time and motivation to make an updated version of AIDE.