Did a nice extended flight over Argentina today in the Corsair, ended up at SANU. It’s tricky to get trimmed out, but once I did I settled into a nice sedate cruise at 23000 doing about 320 over the ground and only burning 80ish gph.
I think this is the Pampas? Not sure, but it looks kinda neat.
Descending into San Juan.
On the way to an almost perfect 3-point landing. After one small bounce, but who’s counting?
This is a fabulous bird.
Argentina is fantastic to fly in; it’s got such a wide range of topographies from mountain, desert, tundra, pampas. You need a fast plane though, but I see you’ve got that sorted ;)
Guy at work challenged me to fly through the arch at Arches National Park.
He didn’t mention 500 knots, but I threw that part in to make it more exciting. Got it on the first try!
I’m 12 successful legs into the Breckenridge Bush trip now, as of last night. Some of these are very tricky.
I have to admit, when I first saw that there were only 4 bush trips, including the new one that got added in the last update, I was thinking there wasn’t much content there, but just this first Bush trip is pretty epic. 12 legs already, all at least 20 minutes, sometimes more. In terms of substituting for a campaign in this game, if the other 3 Bush trips are this epic too, then this is a lot of hours of content just in these bush trips.
Once I do get done with these, I found a website online where people have made many, many more:
@Pedro, IIRC, you made a bush trip upthread as well right? Maybe after I get done with the official ones, I’ll do yours next.
Yeah, I’ve been meaning to dive back into the official content, but I’ve been so focused on FSE/Neofly that I haven’t had time. I still need to do Alaska, and I’m probably just about competent enough by now for the landing challenges to be worth having a crack at. Tried the Courchevel one about two dozen times at launch and never nailed it, let alone got a decent score.
That reminds me that I haven’t done the Alaska trip either.
@Rock8man Yeah, they are quite the epic trips; by the time you’re finished with them you’ll probably want to do something else, though the other bush trips are a bit shorter.
I created a couple of trips; my first one was around my home area and it was the third user-created trip released, I believe. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to actually create it, and I can’t remember the quality, so I’ll not link that one.
However, my pride and joy :P
Unfortunately it also weighs in at a gargantuan 27 legs, so much respect if you ever get to it ;)
It’s also interesting that this Breckenridge Bush trip really highlights both the game’s strengths and weaknesses.
Weaknesses it highlights:
Strengths:
I haven’t played FS in a while but have they fixed the endless lights on rural roads issue?
I haven’t done too much night time flying yet. So the issue was that they put lights throughout rural roads?
I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing.
I saw a beautiful photograph on Windows the other day, in that log-in screen for Windows 10, you know? It was a beautiful picture of rolling hills and water and rocks and snow and green grass and bushes. Apparently it was a picture of “the land of fire and ice” in Kamchatka peninsula in Russia. So I looked up the location of that photo and went there in Flight Simulator. And it happened to be night time and I could see absolutely nothing. It was just blackness. Complete darkness.
I then changed the time to daytime and plopped myself in the same spot again and discovered it highlights a lot of the game’s weaknesses that I talked about above. Everything was just a flat texture, no vegetation, no real snow, just white texture on hills or green texture, it looked pretty ugly.
Anyway, my point was that I’m not opposed to seeing lights on rural roads at night so that I can make out something at night instead of flying in total darkness.
It’s …pretty over the top. I’ve disassembled my gaming PC but I’ll try to show some examples.
I just finished the Balkans bush trip myself. Lovely flight, pretty scenic. I was amused to be awarded an achievement on completion for not using nav aids, or something. I mean…they give you a complete flight plan pre-loaded into your Garmin. I’m not sure what else you could possibly want!
Someone on flightsim.to has uploaded a Chernobyl bush trip with links to some scenery to amplify it. I’m definitely going to give that a try.
It seems like very few people are doing the bush trips. That Steam achievement has a 0.7% completion rate, and the other two bush trips are similar. And from flightsim.to, it looks like the bushtrip ‘community’ is probably a core of only about 2,000 people. Last year a new trip might get 800-1000 downloads; now it is more like 400-600.
Understandable, there’s a lot of alternate activities, from simming various planes to activities like Air Hauler and FSE. I can’t really talk either; despite making a couple of bush trips, I’ve completed very few of other peoples’.
They’ve improved it greatly. The main road in an area still tends to be lit, though a little more sparsely than before, but in general it’s much better.
The town on the right doesn’t have a lit road going to it for example:
While the general area (reasonably populated) is more believeable:
I went back to my flight from Moscow to Siberia again today. Just miles and miles and miles of flat forests and farms and meandering rivers.
It’s the kind of place that would never ever be generated for a game on purpose if it wasn’t auto-generated like this, from doing the whole world.
Sometimes I’ll go so many miles of dense forests, and then randomly find what’s obviously a farm smack dab in the middle of the trees, with no roads leading to it. It just makes me think: what the hell farmer?
Liveries compatible with the new forked A32NX are appearing on flightsim.to again now, thankfully.
Also, there’s an official community fly in tonight. I really enjoy these. I have the official Twitch up on one monitor but I hang around in the discord and chat with the people there instead of on Twitch. I’ve done several of these now and they’re very pleasant. We just chill while we fly, discussing the simulator, latest addons, compare hardware preferences, discuss the best way to approach the landing etc.
The routes are always good too. My favourite so far was a low level tour of the Norwegian fjords (a very well made flight plan which I’ve saved to do again). Tonight’s is a tour of some Indonesian islands, with a guest: the creator of the popular Bushtalk radio mod.
This guy lost me a little when he started appreciating all the weird glitches in the simulation within ugly cities. But I’m all in on the parts where he’s walking around beautiful hills and using the game as a walking simulator in those parts.
I did a rando flight from Bakersfield to Boulder City in a Cessna last week. Seeing the little solitary trailers and shit out in the middle of nowhere. Smelling the hot metal, listening to the bangs of the old screen door blowing in the desert breeze.
Jan Kees Blom (Jankees) is amazing. He’s already contributed about 150 repaints of various planes, from fighters to airliners, on Flightsim.to. (And hundreds more for FSX/P3D on Sim-Outhouse.) I requested the Flying Heritage collection’s FG-1D on Flightsim.to and this is the result, along with a pic I took of the real plane. So talented, and so prolific!
Breckenridge Leg 14 is the first time I completely stopped trying to figure out the text description of where I’m supposed to go. I just ended up completely lost twice, not knowing what the heck they were talking about.
Instead, on the third try I used the headings and the time. So heading 302 for five minutes and 20 seconds, that type of thing. I followed those instructions, but I always wondered how they get those times. Are those times taken with the plane at top speed? Anyway, I got where I thought the runway had to be (judging by the 2D map, since it was South of a lake) about 90 seconds ahead of the time specified by the final instruction. I figured because of the map that if I go farther, it doesn’t make any sense because I’ll leave the lake behind. But the little picture of the landing strip showed a bunch of red land around the runway, and I didn’t see any red lands anywhere in that area.
I flew around for about 20 minutes south of that lake, just flying in circles looking for a red area that looked like the picture and just didn’t find it. Finally I just looked at where on the map I should be compared to the lake, and I landed, and I taxi’d around for a while, and I found some runway yellow markers! So I stopped the plane. Phew! That was it. I wonder why the land wasn’t red like the picture though.
Haha, that’s great. I did a tourist trip via helicopter to the Grand Canyon years back, and flying over these solitary trailers out in the desert blew my mind.
I had to redo that leg a couple of times. The right-angled roads direction threw me, as there were several before the one you’re supposed to use. Looks like there’s a dark-coloured section of land to the north which might be your red? I’m colourblind so I don’t register those things.
Yeah, the time that displays on the navlog is calculated by the system when you start the flight. For example, if you swapped out your cub for a jet in the files (you’d have to do this before leg 1 ;) ), it would show the jet times between POIs. I assume it chooses the best possible speed; I’ve never been able to match the times between POIs myself, I’m always slower.
You’re well through the trip now, keep going! Hope you’re still enjoying it.
