Hi David,

Placing the aircraft in your design tool properly can simplify understanding for you.  Generally one will place the aircraft at or near the CoG at your 0,0,0 coordinates or at the crosshairs in the design tool.

This would be center line longitudinally, at or near the waterline or thrust line vertically, and 1/4 back from the leading edge of the wing root.

I wrote this explanation about gear animation and setup in the contact points and it links also to some CoG examples from Lou "Firestriker" Volland for setup that might help.  Jerry Beckwith's Suspension setup graphic explanation link is also very helpful to picture the problem.

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?t=944

Remember you can get all your aircraft.cfg coordinates for gear, lights, scrape points etc. right from your design tool.  Just find a vertice closest to the point you want a copy those coordinates (convert to feet for the cfg).

Typically a dancing aircraft has a couple problems but the primary one is improper suspension setup (usually the suspension is way too stiff), second is that the static pitch and height is incorrect so when dropping out of slew, the stiff suspension goes dancing.  Third is the CoG may be a bit off.  You can download AFSD to get a precise read on that.

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/hsors/index.html

Great tools there as well.

Hope this helps.

Absolutely.  Static compression of zero is like jumping off the steps with your legs locked.  Nothing to absorb the shock.

Just like a car on a frame jack, wheels hang almost half the wheel size.  Under static compression they use up maybe 60-70% of the available suspension.  So, static compression is important to good ground handling and realism.  Use about two thirds (60 to 66%)of total animation for static compression, 1/3 for max-static ratio.

A good working suspension might use numbers like this:
static compression= 0.6' (7.3")
max-static ratio= 1.5' (for 3.5" totaling 10.8" of suspension.)

So, in this example, 60% is static, 40% is remaining compression available for hard landings.

Ensure your model allows enough animation in the gear to accommodate a good working suspension.  Get you animation distances directly from the model at frame 100 to 200.

Also get your vertical distance to the ground at frame 100 using a vertice at the bottom of the tire.

And anytime you change static compression, you will need to change vertical distance to the ground in the contact points.

For the nose gear, never use more than 60% for static compression as it only carries about 20% of the weight.  40-50% may be better.

Hope this helps.

It's just awesome when you can make it all come together the way you want it to.  Thanks for following all the instruction and examples.  That says a lot about you and your determination to succeed.  Congrats on that success!