I took the Zenith out in far northeastern Spain today. I’ve never flown there much. It doesn’t look like what you’d – or, at least, what I’d – imagine.
There’s a strip along the north coast that is more like Ireland or Wales due to the amount of rain it gets; very surprising. Beautiful shots!
Thanks! FSPlayground has made it possible to be a somewhat decent in-sim photographer.
And yeah, that area’s amazing. I’ve been meaning to fly more in the Pyrenees, too. There’s some amazing valley flying to do there.
Wait … talk to me. What is FSPlayground?
This is FSPlayground. It’s a flight recorder. And a bunch of other stuff I don’t need that I wish it didn’t have because the UI is pretty clunky, and loading a lot of functionality on top of it isn’t great.
But it works well for recording a flight then playing it back so you can frame up the perfect shot. Or relive an awesome landing. If you’re thinking about it, you might want to wait for FS Recorder, which is reportedly due within a week or so.
But for now, it works, and it’s the only game in town.
Whoa that’s pretty nifty! Thanks for the link!
No problem! Like I said, I might consider waiting if I were buying now, unless you’re just burning to get it to play with it. I don’t regret the purchase a bit, but I’m interested in seeing how FSR compares when it’s ready.
Replay is in development as a built-in feature, as well, though I haven’t heard which sim update it’s planned for.
Got to try this out at the weekend - it’s pretty nifty!
I did wonder at the start what it added to the whole experience, but I definitely appreciate the map, and the time acceleration controls, which don’t require both hands when you’re on approach. I’ve been using it quite a bit.
I haven’t used the COM or NAV tabs so far.
Other than that, I’ve been hammering FSE, almost up against my time limit every day. I was flying in Wales last week and sometimes at these little-frequented airports I use the expenses functionality to check into a hotel for the night, buy a few quarts of oil and a wash for the plane etc, just to throw the operator a few bucks.
Friday I got an email…
Dear Guest,
it’s been a pleasure to have you as a guest in the Twin Tower Gatehouse Hotel in Caernarfon. Hope you enjoyed your stay regardless of the rainwater leak in the hall, repair works are ongoing so next time you’ll not see those yellow plastic buckets around catching the ingressing water.
Yours,
Mandy (Hotel Management Team)
Very Welsh. I have to admit it made my stay. :D
In other news, the South American Corporate PAX jobs are going through a dry patch, so I decided I’d head back to my old stamping ground in southern Chile. I also decided to rent some gates at an FBO halfway there, thinking I’d generate some flights to and from the far south. It doesn’t seem as easy as all that, because generated flights are semi random, so it’s not really a money making racket. But I got 4 gates (3 PAX per gate) for a month for 12K, so it will be an interesting experiment and won’t break the bank.
I also noticed loads of FBOs for sale. I guess people gravitate towards that side of things eventually. FBOs in the midwest were dead cheap (70K upwards), while there were three in Outer Mongolia for 5m each!
Since moving to VR, I’ve put time acceleration on the second hat on my joystick (the one that was bound to trim by default).
Yeah, I’m still using the stupid old gamepad + keyboard. Which is becoming pretty unsatisfying, as using face buttons for throttle and things like that mean over- or under- throttling a lot of the time. I’m sure I didn’t have this issue early on but it seems to be getting worse.
I love hearing the bit about the hotel, that’s funny! I should do that. I tend to leave my planes in random spots that have great passenger build-ups. For some reason both of the King Airs are in Alabama simply because both of the spots had oodles of passengers nobody was ferrying. It does change over time though. That run I did in South Africa for a while kind of dried up.
I think Matt and I both tired renting some gates at FBO’s for a while. Finding FBOs for sale is harder (in the US) unless they are way out. The better purchase is to buy someone else’s entire grid sale where they typically have 4-5 FBOs near each other with gates ready to go already. You don’t make money on the gates but rather generate money for yourself to ferry the passengers/cargo. Especially so since you can mark them as private and only you can haul them.
When selecting where the gates go, for best results only put in one destination. You can also set it for one passenger waiting to list, meaning based on the number of gates you rent, it will slowly start generating single passenger runs, up to 3 per gate I think. This works well if you have a hub you like, then just look for gates or FBOs nearby and generate your own runs back to that hub. There is also a checkmark I believe to generate runs BACK if someone makes runs to your gate.
Dude! We’ve got to get you a flight stick. Where are you located in RL?
That’s good info, thanks. I do have jobs generating at all three airports (the rented one plus the two destinations) so we’ll see how it goes. I will change to one destination, I think. I’ve been changing the passenger numbers quite a bit as I didn’t know the effect but will do that too.
Yeah, there were some tasty FBO networks for sale on the FSE forums over the last few days, it could make sense to save up a few million in case the chance comes up again. I don’t think I’m ready yet to restrict myself to the same couple of routes though.
I’m in Ireland, so dependent on Amazon UK for this stuff. I had my eyes on the T.16000M for a while, and I see they are actually back in stock now, so maybe it’s time to consider that. Then I started yearning after the Honeycomb yoke, but that’s a bit of a pipe dream as I know no other gamers in RL, so the stigma would be too much, I think ;)
I’d love a Honeycomb, they have been out-of-stock with only very small one-day exceptions since MSFS 2020 launch. :( The Thrustmaster stuff appears a bit more available at least which is how I landed one, the T.16000M and TWCS throttle combo. I have no issues with it except trying to determine what all I want mapped to all the buttons, lol.
I picked a random reseller off of NewEgg that had decent reviews and ordered there. Being in Ireland, I know you’d need to pick and choose who could ship it more quickly.
In FSE update for me, the second King Air is about paid for, I’m down to 70K I think. I was going to throw some more cash at Ike to ensure his plane gets paid off. How are you on the recent purchases? Still owe much?
I agree and will pad the Group account back up once this King Air is paid off as well. It builds up fairly quickly.
If the group is going for an FBO, I might be tempted to dip my toe back in FSE. Certainly I can transfer funds if I still have any.
Sounds good. We’re without cash for an FBO currently so it will be a bit. I’d be willing to consider one where we could set up a small network no matter where it’s at. AKA, have planes will travel.
T.16000M might be the way to go for me too then! Yeah, I absolutely am not looking forward to the button mapping.
They are all small planes so the debt isn’t huge. I have two Piaggios, a Bonanza and a Mooney :P I will probably pay them off in the next week or so. If I need to contribute cash to the group account for Ike’s plane, let me know, it’s no problem!
Preferably the FBOs would be in a visually stunning area - none of this dead flat nonsense. :P You’re probably paying for that though.
I saw that the Twin Otter 3rd party plane is close to completion and thought about buying one in FSE to have some fun with it. They run about the same cost as a King Air but are a bit more fun with flying passengers from STOL locations.
For fun, here’s a Twin Otter taking off and landing at Saba.
Hah! That looks great, have to get one of those.