Plane SITL needs realistic power handling

I am working on a “Instructor Station” plugin for MAVProxy - and have discovered some shortcuts.

Using sim_vehicle.py - the plane flies fine also at only 3v … the lower the voltage goes, the higher the throttle demand increases, resulting in better thrust/speed.

The problem is that thrust is calculated only by thrust demand, and voltage/current is ignored.

One would expect that a required power (watts) was needed for a given mass and drag
And then voltage and current should behave realistically based on the internal resistance the virtual battery.

Check out this wiki page for a real aircraft. Battery Voltage Compensation — Plane documentation

For the built in SITL model there isn’t a whole lot of need for the extra complexity. An external simulator would probably have that feature available.