I’ve tried and tried but am obviously am still misreading the SDK.  My little aircraft has come a long way and lots of people are now flying it despite it’s still being incomplete.  One thing in particular that has been gnawing away at me, and that I would like to clean up first, is the fact that the nose wheel still dives under the pavement during hard acceleration or braking.  The nose wheel travel - from first runway contact, to full compression - seem right when watching the aircraft, but then there is that dam dive below the runway. 
Any idea how I could remedy this?  So I could put out a corrected cfg and air file

Harold
www.dickert.ca/swift

When the nosewheel "dives" into the ground, it's because the total suspension travel defined in the cfg file is greater than the travel animated into the model (keyframes 101-200)..

As MSFS tries to continue compresing the suspension PAST what the model can do.. it just "forces" the wheel into the ground (because it thinks the suspension is still compressing)


You need to measure the total suspension travel, from within the modeling program (101-200).. and then go from there..

Hi Brent,

Thanks for the help.  I went to that other page you listed and started at the top.  
Another case of meticulously following the instructions and Dam, it’s worse!  So here’s the scoop.  I opened up the gmax file to really measure things in detail.  Some sizes came right out of the properties.  For others, I made a box and moved it around or resized it as needed, for example putting the bottom of the box even with the fully extended gear, and the top of the box even with the compressed gear.  Then going into the properties for the box and noting that dimension.  Ok, so that’s the gear travel, next…
Convert all these numbers to feet.  Do the math and load the numbers into the CFG.  “At this point I am really expecting this thing to look like a million bucks”
Load the game and my aircraft, “Dam! This sucks!”  The nose wheel strut is half underground!!!  Ok the throttle on the joystick happened to be at full thrust.  Backing off the throttle, the nose strut partly unburied itself.  Adding reverse, the wheel came out of the runway.  So here is the interesting part  –  I’m still adding reverse thrust driving the tail down/nose up and just as the bottom of the wheel was flush with the runway, the trailing link started to uncompress along with further movement of the nose.  Once the link was fully uncompressed, the wheel left the runway just as you would expect it to, and the aircraft was well on it’s way to tipping over backward.   “Time to add forward thrust and putter’ back on all three”.
Doing this little “smash the tail, smash the nose dance a few times and it was clear that the position of the strut, link, and wheel all seemed correct up to the point of full compression, then adding more thrust or hard braking if the aircraft was rolling forward would drive the nose to hell.  Taxiing backwards and everything look great, (except the taxiing backwards part).  Shutting off the engine also had the aircraft nose spring back up with the nose wheel and link in the right place.
Doing wheelies down the runway and repeatedly driving the nose wheel back to the pavement also looked good, with the smoke effect dumping copious amount of virtual rubber into the air at exactly the instant the wheel touched down.  Then I’d put the brakes on and again the nose dived to China!  (I live near Toronto)

These are the numbers:
point.0= 1.000, 8.100, 0.000, -2.496, 8000.000, 0.000, 0.656, 70.000, 0.211, 1.336, 0.800, 5.000, 7.000, 0.000, 300.000, 350.000
// full nose wheel travel is .282ft.; static position is 3/4 travel or .211ft.
// comp ratio is .282 / .211 = 1.336

Yessssss, those are some dam small numbers, but then this jet only has a 14 foot wingspan.

Please tell me “look you sleep deprived fool, you missed XXXX and XYZ”
Otherwise, I have no clue how to proceed.