X-Plane fuel tanks not appearing in FSA client

Please report Bugs and Problems here
Post Reply
haeriphos
Ticket Agent
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Dec 16, 2017 8:57 pm

X-Plane fuel tanks not appearing in FSA client

Post by haeriphos » Sun Mar 04, 2018 2:22 am

I ran into an interesting problem with the RWDesigns Twin Otter (v2). I'm not sure if this problem existed in v1 as I don't think I ever flew it in FSA.

When you load the fuel using the FSA client only one tank shows up as usable (I think it is the left one). So when you load fuel you're only loading one tank; but when you fly in the sim you're flying off both tanks. The end result is that any fuel burned in the second tank is not recorded by FSA and your fuel usage will look suspiciously low. The model itself has a forward and an aft tank, and the developer has called these fuel0 and fuel2. For some reason he skipped fuel1. The current XP client (2.2.0 rc3) seems to stop looking for more fuel tanks once it reaches one that is undefined (fuel1 in this case). This is quite reasonable but it ends up missing fuel2 in this model. I've emailed Joe about this and he's going to look into it, but in the meantime I wanted to post a quick workaround to get past this. I would assume this may work in other models with this unique fuel tank setup as well.

1. Back up your ACF file. In this case I'm going to be modifying DHC6.acf, but if you want these same changes to be made in the floats, ski, or tundra versions you'll need to modify those ACF files also.

2. Disable the auto-update feature for the Twotter. This is a very nice feature but if we leave it enabled our changes will be overwritten each time we start X-Plane because the "newest" ACF file will be different than the one that we are going to create. You can disable this by starting X-Plane and going to the STMA Autoupdate entry in the Plugins menu. Quit X-Plane when you're done.

3. Open PlaneMaker in the X-Plane directory and open the Twin Otter with the default livery.

4. Under the Standard menu, select Weight and Balance.

5. Select the Tanks tab and you'll see the fuel tank configuration. Notice that tanks 1 and 3 are defined, but 2 is not.

6. Change tank #2 ratio to 0.001 and leave everything else that appears at 0.

7. Close the tanks window, save the changes, and exit Plane Maker. The FSA client should now work with the Twotter!

Post Reply