Stall Limiter
From SkyFighters Wiki
This page describes the Stall Limiter, a SkyFighters feature that makes the planes easier to fly. Read on to understand what it is and when you'll be ready to turn it off.
By default, SkyFighters (both 1918 and 1945) have the stall limiter turned on. To confirm this, go to the main program menu (e.g. "OSX SkyFighters 1945 wMB") and select the 'Preferences' option. On that page is a checkbox for the stall limiter. If the box is checked, the stall limiter is enabled.
The stall limiter does two things:
- Limits the severity of stalls so they're easier to recover from
- Prevents high speed stalls from occurring at all
Even with the stall limiter on it's still possible to stall the plane by flying too slowly. You'll hear the stall horn, the plane will shudder a bit, and then it will try to fall out of the air. With the stall limiter on, recovering from a stall is usually pretty easy. Just push the nose down and go to full throttle and you should be out of the stall quickly (assuming you have enough altitude to recover before hitting the ground).
With the stall limiter disabled, things get interesting. Planes will still stall when flown too slowly, but recovering gets more difficult and often requires more altitude. More importantly, it's possible to stall the plane even when flying quite quickly, like above 300mph. Why? According to congobob (our resident aircraft expert on the SkyFighters forum) what happens is that when the aircraft pitches up at too high of an angle of attack (the angle of the wing versus the direction of airflow), the wing stops generating lift. In the game, this happens when you haul back on the stick hard.
With the stall limiter disabled, you have to learn to have a light touch on the controls and relax your control input immediately if you sense the beginning of a stall. When flying the Zero the lack of the stall limiter is hardly noticeable; when flying the Corsair the lack of the limiter completely changes how you fly the plane as recovering from a high-speed stall in the F4U is extremely difficult. The other planes are somewhere in between.
Check your preferences to see if you've been flying with the limiter on. If so, turn it off and then try out the various planes to see how their handling changes when you don't have the limiter helping you out.
