Nice flight, it reminded me of my day yesterday
I enjoyed just flying precision with it and short high harriers and hovers went fine. I tried some half hearted flips and pinwheels but a couple of times it did some crazy gyration departures on its own after I released the inputs. Both times that happened I centered the sticks and when it kept tumbling I switched back to my no gryo, taileron, or vector FM1 and got the nose down to fly out. But when it went a bit crazy I was in my hover flight mode with high vector gyro gains and heading hold so it must have been the gyro confused. I guess I have some learning to do...
I do have some great set up advice. Now that I don't need a no gyro FM I will set up a 3D flight mode in FM2 with less pipe gain, travel, and no HH on and try flips and pinwheels again.
But basically first day out, Powerbox Royal, I had a basic FM1, no gyro, low rates. The plane flew great like this. I trimmed the pipe or actually I found the pipe to be fine just having eyeballed it and trimmed it from my CORE. With any other plane I would have moved on to knife edge mixes etc. but instead I went to my FM2. That was the same as FM1 but with gyro and a small amount of HH on aileron and elevator. It flew pretty much the same but I could see how HH kind of does the same job as mixing out rolling or pulling to the canopy in knife edge, up and down lines, etc. If you can keep your fingers off the sticks. HH is a strange thing, my first try with that, but really low gain, like 3. FM3 is a hover set up.
I still need to play with trims more and especially gains. I can see why properly trimming a Mephisto to perform optimally in different flight regimes will require a lot of flights but I'm happy to do it!