Fuel Feed From Drop Tanks on the Ground

[Rhino]

As most of you know, equipping empty external tanks is not currently something you can do in the Hornet, (or any ED module I believe) like you can do in the Tomcat. However, there is a work around. In the Rearm/Refuel page, equip a drop tank (or 2 or 3) and then reduce the slider for your internal fuel. Once your in the jet, bring up the fuel page and you can see that as the engines run at idle, only the internal fuel number goes down while there is weight on the wheels. Once you take off, fuel starts flowing from the external tanks, replenishing the internal wing and fuselage tanks. This is why it seems like the ~2,000ish pounds in the external tanks is used up very fast.

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On the ground, you can force the aircraft to pull fuel from the external tanks by flipping the tank control switches to "Override". These switches are located just behind the throttle between the fuel dump and fuel probe switches. With the tanks in Override, they will feed to the internal tanks. With the correct reduction in the internal fuel slider, you can get pretty close to max internal fuel and empty drop tanks before you take off.

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Why would you want to do this? Well, it could be useful for launching with a heavy weapons loadout, reducing the initial fuel load to get under the max take off weight and then topping off from an airborne tanker before continuing on a mission. This way you can be airborne at a higher weight than you can actually launch with.

For a single tank, reduce the internal fuel to ~79%
For two tanks, reduce in the internal fuel to ~58%
For three Tanks, reduce the internal fuel to ~37%

Additionally, when refueling either air to air or hot pit on the ground, flipping those tank control switches to "Stop" will prevent them from being fueled. This is handy when hitting the recovery tanker for just a little bit of gas, slightly reducing the amount of time it takes to complete a refueling evolution and helping you keep a proper weight balance on the jet. Don't want to land with half a full wing tanks sloshing around on a trap.