Yeah., @Matt_W 's link to GAST is the way to go if you want shipping. It’s not real-time, but it does have animated ships that move according to pre-programmed real world routes. I’m not sure if SimConnect provides, at this point, the interface that would be needed to arbitrarily move ships around live based on real-time traffic.
Doesn’t mean it won’t at some point, though. :)
I use GAST. It works just fine. The one caveat is that rather than using native gjtf objects they’re using legacy format ones which the sim needs to convert to work. So when you hit a new area with a lot of different ships there can be a halt in the sim as it compiles everything to native. But once done it’s all good.
They’re working on a new version updated with MSFS native objects and all the shiny new goodness, but it will probably be a while.
OrbX also has enhanced ship traffic for the Channel Islands. It’s pretty good, and free. (It’s a preview of a fuller commercial product, I think.) It’s worth checking out:
Funny. I didn’t watch the whole thing in full and they may have said this, but if you want to do Stupid Carrier Tricks yourself, Kinetic Assistant is probably what they’re using. It’s also useful for gliders.
I finally successfully landed that second leg of the Brekenridge Bush trip yesterday. And then for the 3rd leg, I managed to land it on the first attempt! I think I’m finally getting used to these brakes! No, that’s not really fair. The runway at the end of the 3rd leg is so long that my plane actually came to a stop without ever touching the brakes.
It’s really interesting that they made the Los Angeles aqueduct so twisty and windy, and not just a straight shot downhill like the highway that’s next to it. Maybe it helps the flow of water if you keep doing twists and turns?
I find it utterly strange to be tramping around the hills up near Mammoth and happen upon signs in the middle of the wilderness that warn you that the land and water you’re approaching is the property of the City of Los Angeles water department, which is hundreds of miles away, on the other side of the highest mountain range in the continental U.S. The character of the Owens Valley–basically a dust-blown desert from Bishop south to Olancha with a handful of strip communities like Lone Pine that survive on ranching and tourism–is in large part because it sends its water west.
I suspect the twists and turns are to keep the water on a downhill course. The road (highway 395) is utterly straight (have become mesmerized driving it many times), but has dips and rises in it.
Well I just got the biggest adrenaline rush I’ve had in flight sim in a long time. I noticed in my NeoFly campaign that there was almost a $200 difference in the price of phones between airports about 30 miles apart. So I figured I’d turn a quick buck by taking out a loan, filling my hold with phones, flying for 20 minutes and flipping them.
Well. Then I looked at the field I needed to take them to. MM03 in the game. It looks like this:
But, I mean… looks can be deceiving. It might not be al that bad, can it?
Oh, no, it might actually be worse.
(Oh, and did I mention that phones are fragile cargo and if you land at over 200fpm they brake and your profit goes down the tubes?)
I decided to do it. I was going to take $200,000 worth of phones and airlift them to… that. Even if I fail, it’s not real money, and it’d make a fun challenge, anyway. So I loaded up my XCub and hit the air.
And my friends, I tell you, it was even scarier in person. This is what I found myself having to land on. 850 feet of narrow, uphill slope on the side of a mountain in the middle of the jungle.
Long story short, I nailed it. VS at touchdown was -119.02. Stoked.
I’ll upload a video later on tonight or tomorrow, I wanna share this triumph with some folks. :D Until then, I leave you with this. Most bush strips seem less scary when you get close. This one just got scarier.
That’s a good place to be in. It is oddly comforting. I think they touched on it during one of the dev talks. It’s COVID, we can’t go anywhere but suddenly now we can go EVERYWHERE. It’s very zen flying over the landscape, especially when it’s pretty. I dig it as well.
It’s so strange to be exploring this almost alien landscape. It’s hard for me to believe that humans saw this desolate moonscape and said “let’s live here”. After the fourth leg, the fifth leg’s descriptions had me all confused, there’s only 3 steps, and the VFR map is very misleading, and unlike any other game in existence, this one lets me go miles and miles off course because, you know, I have a whole planet to work with here. I finally realized there was no way I was following the right road. And I couldn’t just guess and cut across some mountains to get back on track since I had no clue where I was. So I actually followed the same road all the way back almost to where I took off, to find the highway that I should have taken, but even that one didn’t seem to match up with what I was supposed to be doing on the map. But I kept following it anyway, and I was almost out of fuel, and I finally realized I was on the right track, and I saw the airfield where I was supposed to land. Phew. I landed and broke too soon and the plane crashed by leaning forward into the ground.
Thanks! And yeah, landing in those places is actually a fun puzzle sometimes. “How can I line up the best approach in… this?” I heaved a big sigh of relief when I got it down, though, for sure, fun puzzle or no.
I’ve been using Flight Replay. It’s not as full-featured as FSPlayground, but it’s also a lot more straight forward to use for “just a replay”. Plus, I like that it actually lets you export your flight data as a CSV so you can analyze it that way, too.
Oh, one tail-dragger specific tip that I don’t think was mentioned up-thread, though apologies if it was and I missed it. One thing you can do to help fight the nose-over is, once you’re below stall speed, go to full back-pressure on the stick. This helps keep your tail planted, and it’s surprising what a difference that makes in how hard you can brake.
When I’m trying to land super duper short, what I usually do if I’m feeling clever and coordinated enough for it is to touch down, and just as soon as I hear the contact (since it’s hard to feel in the sim) I raise flaps to dump all the lift I can and haul back on the stick while braking as much as I feel safe doing. Usually it’s a lot, in that configuration.
(If I’m fighting a heavy crosswind I’m usually too busy with other things to dump flaps, though.)
Also, one more tip: if you feel like you’re starting to nose over, don’t just let up on the brakes, give the throttle a goose, too. That will help level you back out, assuming you have room for it.
Yes, someone did advise that upthread (back-pressure on the stick), and it mostly does work, but it’s very tricky for two reasons.
First, as you note, you can only do it after you’re below stall speed. If you land hot and are still slowing down and trying not to hit the brakes yet, pulling back on the stick is problematic because you take off again.
Second, on this plane, when you pull back, you’re back to the state as in takeoff, facing towards the sky. On takeoff this isn’t so bad, because as soon as you throttle up, you can see where you’re going, but when you’re trying to land and going left and right, it really sucks to suddenly be facing the sky and not know where you’re going. Lately I’ve started to switch to 3rd person view for this reason. It feels like cheating, but I honestly have no idea how the pilots who fly this thing in real life see where they’re going.
Different topic:
What’s a good way to see some gorgeous clouds? So far I’ve only been low to the ground or in bight sunny days with no clouds in sight. Does the airliner tutorials have beautiful clouds I wonder? Passenger jets have to fly really high in the sky, right?
Hehe, yep. I’m guilty of having done that a time or two. :)
One thing that can help, if you don’t do it already, is to hit spacebar (there’s probably a controller mapping, too, if not you can create one), which raises your seating position so you’re not quite as blinded by the cowl. It helps a fair bit in the XCub, though what you’re fighting is indeed a real-world problem.
On an extended taxi with enough room you can serpentine, which lets you see where you’re going alternately to the forward left and forward right. Without that, you just have to use your awareness and make a note of where you’re going to go while you can still see it. It’s tricky.
Trent Palmer, who is a rather annoying dude with a cool plane, actually installed a forward facing camera in the nose of his Kitfox and piped the video into the video-in on his G3X. When he’s taxiing he can just watch where he’s going on television. 😂
I’d love to be able to replicate that in the sim. It’d make a lot of people happy.
Some of the landing challenges have pretty clouds. I think the very first one, in the Robin, had some amazing sunset clouds. One thing you could do, if you’re using real world weather, is to look for places with the kind of clouds your looking for. Live weather is a little flaky sometimes, but more often than not is resembles the real world METAR enough to be useful for something like this.
You can also always generate them yourself by tweaking the weather. There are some additional presets on flightsim.to, in addition to a not-too-expensive commercial package OrbX sells.
I’ll just post again rather than editing that one a second time. I’m working on a METAR-search client which uses the public feed available from NOAA to search for weather. Right now, it will only display the most recent METAR from one or more ICAOs on the command line, but I’m slowly adding more features to it.
(This is a personal project, not a Working Title one, so progress isn’t the fastest.)
Until/unless something like that exists, if you wanted to search METARs you could download the latest bulk update here [caution, direct link to a 1MB CSV], load it into Excel or similar, and filter the sky_cover columns for, say, SCT or BKN at an interesting altitude.
As examples, I just found this at KMAO, which was BKN 2700 BKN 3600 BKN 4200:
Huh, going by the comparison shots it seems to work just fine! Good job! And well done for getting NOAA data; the author of Little Nav Map really seems to be struggling with it at the moment.
