Hi guys - thanks for this useful input.
I had already started down the road of playing with the lever_speed_brake entry in modeldef, and there do seem to be some hard-coded restrictions. Changing the Lag parameter makes no difference - it just gets reset to 200 when the model is compiled (you can see it in the MCX modeldef). You can change the length/animation length, and it stays changed, but again it seems to make no difference.
(BTW I'm not entirely sure what the Length parm means - is it the number of frames or the duration of the animation ? When I re-timed the 100 frames in MCX to have a +5 gap between them instead of +1, MCX automatically sets the length to 500, the value of the last frame. You can change this, but MCX resets it to 500 when the model is compiled.)
However, i have had some success based on your suggestions. I re-assigned the animations to
door_0, and now the bomb doors work fine, even using the original animation timings. The only problem is that to activate them I have to use the Doors Open/Close control (
Shift+E). Somehow I need to map them to the Spoiler control. I've tried editing the door_0 entry in modeldef to use the Spoiler lever position, but that just flips the doors open and close. Adding a Lag entry doesn't help, and the cfg entries Rick mentions don't seem to make a difference either (I suspect they only work if if Shift+E is used).
But that's good progress - thanks guys. I need to play some more.