P-51 Civilian pilot notes tweaked to show speeds in knots

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Paughco
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Joined: 30 Nov 2014, 12:27

P-51 Civilian pilot notes tweaked to show speeds in knots

Post by Paughco »

Guys: The Civilian P-51D airspeed indicator is calibrated in knots. All the POH references and even the pilot's notes (shift+2) are stated in units of miles per hour. If you don't take this into account, and think that you are "flying by the numbers" by simply using the numbers given in the pilot's notes in your Civ P-51, you may be overstressing the landing gear, the flaps, or even the whole airplane; at a minimum you'll be landing too fast. The pilot notes are contained in a file called clipboard.xml. I have managed to tweak my copy of clipboard.xml to show knots for Vne, Vfe, etc. Here is a screenshot:

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It's not hard to do. If you have P3D, the clipboard.xml for your Civ P-51 should be located here: C:\Users\MyName\Documents\Prepar3D v4 Add-ons\A2A\SimObjects\Airplanes\WoP3_P51D_civ\panel\WoP3_P51D. You can double click on the file clipboard.xml and it will open up in your web browser. You can also open it, edit it, and then save it using Microsoft Notepad.

1. Click right on the file clipboard.xml for your Civilian P-51 and hover your cursor over the "open with" selection, then click left on Notepad.
2. Save your clipboard.xml as clipboard.bak, or something else. It'll show up as clipboard.bak.txt. Notepad pretty much always puts ".txt" at end of a file when you "save as."
3. Quit clipboard, then open up your original clipboard.xml with Notepad. Here is where it gets interesting.
4. Hit Ctrl+F to open the search window and search for mph. Note that there are instances of "mph" that you want to leave alone. You will see that the little grey airspeed reading for knots is calculated by multiplying mph by the factor of 1.15078. DO NOT MESS WITH THAT ONE.
5. Keep looking. On about the 7th instance of "mph" you'll see that you are in the area where the pilot's notes are giving you the recommended climb and cruise speed ranges. Here you may want to change "175-150mph" and "290-200mph" to "150-130 kts" and "250-175 kts" respectively. Don't take my word for it - do your own conversion. Up to you whether you add in the little space or not. Note that you have to do this twice, once for the 130 octane numbers, and again for the 100 octane numbers.
6. Keep looking for "mph" by clicking Find Next. Pretty soon you'll run across the recommended max speeds. Also, note that each line in the xml file ends in "\n." Don't lose that when you make changes. I changed gear speed from 170 mph to 150 kts; Dive speed from 505 mph to 440 kts; first notch flaps from 400 mph to 350 kts; full flaps from 165 mph to 145 kts.
7. Keep looking for the "APPROACH and LANDING" section. Change the 200 mph to 175 kts, gear speed from 170 mph to 150 kts, and cross fence speed from 120 mph to 105 kts.
8. Save. Check to see if a .txt got appended on the end of your clipboard.xml. I don't think it does in a direct "save," but if it does, change it to "clipboard.xml".
9. Open up your flight sim, and load the Civilian Mustang. Hit Shift+2 and check out your clipboard. You may have to go back to your clipboard.xml file and add in a "\n" or something. I checked it carefully with clipboard.xml open in one window and clipboard.bak.txt in another to make sure that I didn't screw anything up.

I hope that this hasn't broken any A2A rules. I do want my airspeeds to read correctly relative to my airspeed indicator, however.

Seeya
ATB
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