Problems with tail-wheels in AFPD

I have found, that now and then there are problems with tail-wheel landing gears. I think this tip has been mentioned some times already, but I like to exemplify it here. The problem is, that the effect of tail-wheels is not satisfactory. In my opinion this is mostly caused by and can be solved by the following:

Picture 1. If one would elongate the lowest point of the fuselage to the back, it would many times be obvious that the tail-wheel is above this line. It seems that AFPD handles the complete fuselage as a convex envelope that has the size of the thickest position.
This means that the tail-wheel is placed “inside” the fuselage and does therefore not have any effect.

Picture 2. To solve this, cut out some segments of the fuselage and insert them as new objects.

Picture 3. Here you can see how to do such a segmentation.

Picture 4. You don’t need to add all this new objects one by one and join it with the main fuselage. It is enough to define them as sub-objects of the fuselage. The example shows how such a construction might look in the *.tmg file.
Fuselage is the main part and Fuselage 1 to Fuselage 3 are the additional segments.


Dietmar Kühn (Lego) has added in the Forum that this solution works because AFPD only includes the main objects and not the sub-objects in the calculation of the collisions. An example are the “TOC” models in the simulator, on which the rudder can sink into the ground while torqueing.

Best regards
Tobias