@Mav-jp
Ok, seems it seems the actual problem is about wording. The fact that the manual basically says “eject, don’t land” makes sense since it isn’t a sustainable pressure or predictable outcome. But indeed you have a couple of minutes of control, which doesn’t contradict either you or the manual. It seems I was taking things too literally.
Anyway, I did a bunch of ground tests, easier to replicate:
Scenario 1: start any mission in taxi or runway, cuttof the engine. Wait until RPM goes to 0. Time to surface control collapse:
- do nothing: 6 minutes (roughly)
- half pull of elevator: 2 minutes and a half (roughly)
- full pull of elevator: 2 minutes
- move elevator up and down fully (external view): 3 minutes
- move all surfaces like a madman: 1 minute
- open speedbrake immediatly without doing nothing else: 30 seconds
Scenario 2: take off with EPU in OFF mode, cutoff engine at altitude
- do anything except touch the speedbrake: between 1-3 minutes, since the FLCS does its own thing. This is what threw me off in the previous comments. I had to override the elevator to really force it and see a more replicable result.
- open speedbrake before doing anything else: 10 seconds (opens but only half closes back if you try to close it). The time makes sense since it would use up the main reservoir, but not the FLSC one. In my previous tests I had already moved my controls a lot before so I assume the FLSC reservoir was already used up so opening the brake meant isntant loss of control. In fact this points to the fact that the FLCS accumulator actually provide very few seconds of control alone, the rest of it came from the main accumulators. I did not take that into account before.
So all behaviour seems more than reasonable. I assume that should the actual main accumulator pipes fail, the FLSC accumulator would only have around 10 seconds of usefulness. However in the sim it’s impossible to replicate such a scenario. So call me satisfied on the actual name of this topic. I personally would’ve halved all times, as they seem very generous, but maybe they built the thing like a tank, who knows.
However… two slight issues remain:
- JFS seems overpowered and I can’t figure out why the manual forbids landing with it alone. I had full control, with brakes and emergency gear, very little sluggishness. My assumption is that although the recharging of the JSF/Brake accumulator is realistic, the size of the rest of the system is not taken into account, so the entire system is repressurised at the same rate? That would be easy to fix by scripting the flow from the JSF to drop to something proportional (say, 1/3?) when the accumulators are filled? Normal drain on the system would thus be unsustainable for anything more than short bursts of basic attitude control.
- I still can’t explain how the brakes would stay open against the airstream. Behaviour on the ground is logical.