Fuel usage and landing

[alexis99]

I’ve been thinking a lot about fuel usage and how remaining fuel affects your landing speed.

What have I been doing wrong? I’ve been using normal fuel usage which reduces your fuel usage by half as much as it should. I should be using hard fuel usage.

I’ve been jumping to the next encounter after the mission is complete, in order to get me back to the airfield/carrier quickly. Wrong. Fuel doesn’t burn during the jump. It remains the same after the jump as before. I should be flying waypoints, albeit at 8 times game speed and that way the fuel will burn.

There is no fuel dump feature, so I’m also thinking it might be better to fill 50% internal tanks, but carry a drop tank. Then depending on fuel status, dumping the drop tank earlier than you need to. I did a close Air Support mission in the Canadian CF-18 last night. I blew up one tank with a maverick and was told mission complete. Now I’m lugging back a load of unused mavericks and anti-tank clusters with no other targets to use them on. So, much as it hurts, I have to Jettison them to get my weight down. To work out your landing speed on the CF- 18, you are supposed to start with a base of 120 kts and add 3 kts per 1,000 lb of fuel. (Source: Sting of the Hornet by David L Bashow). So that’s a 150 kts landing speed, which just about works, so the flight model is exceedingly accurate.

Need to up my game and do some flight tests.

Incidentally I noticed on the A-7E Corsair II that at hard fuel setting, on a normal Campaign hop, I don't even get to touch the main tank. The T needle winds down but never to zero, so I'm landing with full main tanks. That's where a fuel dump feature would be useful. So instead, I'm experimenting with 50% fuel in tanks.

[+1977Frenchie]

Yeah, time jump is what it is... a jump time that's it...

As for me, even if anyoing to some, i never jump time and fly from start to finish. You have to really consider how you will be doing your mission and give you enough fuel to dogfight or evade a lot of AA/foes over/near target. I ran out of fuel a few times (one time i came short on CV cause no fuel at all at about 1/4 mile from CV) :)

But always remember this game is not a hardcore one and you have to put aside some real life things :)