The railroad feels like the main backbone in this country, all the meat is hanging off that bone. Though I do wonder, if I just wandered into the forest at random and left the railroad behind, maybe I’d find a random settlement out in the middle of the forests somewhere.
All that flatness would kill me.
Flew a few of QT3’s routes in South Africa last night. I can tell we’re not going to get rich from this scheme, lol.
A few screens from April:
Awesome shots! Where on earth is that flower design at?
Dunhuang (ZLDH),China, just at the end of the runway. It’s impressive and strange.
I’m in the Ural mountain area now. It’s not very impressive in terms of being “mountains”. Reading up on them, they don’t get too much above 1000 feet except in a narrow range, most of which I’m avoiding by taking this train route.
This was weird.
It’s a fairly typical town along this route. I’ve seen dozens and dozens of these by this point. A clearing in the forest for houses, and a lake that’s in the town for some reason. But in this case, the town is yellow! Is that a sulfur mine? I can smell it already. Oh yeah, breathe in that rotten egg smell my comrades.
This soon lead to a big city, but then that lead to an even bigger city!
I mean, look at this place, it’s city as far as I could see in every direction. There’s a soccer stadium there, I wonder if that was one of the locations for the last World Cup?
(Looking it up, it’s Novosibirsk, not one of the cities to host the World Cup in Russia in 2018).
Are you flying east or west? I thought you were going east but if you’re at the Urals… there must still be a bit of Russia to go :)
Yep, flying east. It’s a huge freakin’ country. Even bigger than I’d imagined in my mind.
However, getting to Novosibirsk by rail hadn’t been the plan. I’d planned to find the rail turnoff towards Surgut and make a pitstop there as my first landing. But I must have missed the turnoff.
The plan was then to come South along the Ob river down to Novosibirsk to rejoin the rail journey east. Since I reached Novosibirsk already by rail (D’oh!) I must have missed the turnoff, so I decided to reload back to one of the split points a little earlier in the journey and forget trying to find the right turnoff via rail, and just start flying straight to Surgut.
I reached to about 350 miles to go from Surgut last night. As I suspected going straight there and not taking the railroad, it was hard to find any human civilization along the way. It was mostly just vast untouched forests and rivers, and some gentle hills.
I’ve been lost in “making the sim” land for a while and haven’t had any “play the sim” time, but I started it up today in “play” mode for the first time in a week. No great adventures, but Carenado’s new Seneca is really quite good. After a some circuits and a 300nm test flight, I’d put it about on par with the M20R, which to me is one of Carenado’s (few) truly great planes.
Was looking on Bing Maps for these locations. You’re well out in the weeds now :P
What are you doing for fun these days when you get time? Still the STOL stuff, or more of a mixture/balance?
I’ve been totally wrapped up in FSE, to the point where it’s becoming a chore now. I might leave it for a while and do something more constructive than endlessly buying crap and paying it off.
Yeah, no kidding. I initially thought I wanted something in the Ural mountains for my first pit stop and picked a location at random from the globe menu. When I was on my way, I looked at it in Google Earth and thought, wow, this looks like a great pick, it’s right smack dab in the middle of what looks like two mountain ranges, in a river valley, this should be perfect.
It was only when I started approaching the area in Flight Sim that I realized, wait a minute, there’s no mountains or even hills here. It’s just as flat as the anything else in Russia. So why the heck does the Google Earth image looks like it’s surrounded by mountains? If anything, in Flight Sim I found it to be the land of Lakes, and swamps, basically.
I zoomed into the image on Google Earth.
Huh, yep. It’s just lakes and swamps. But when you’re zoomed out, the color of the lakes and swamps makes it look like mountains on the map.
One of the areas that really needs a pass of sprucing up is China. I hope that gets a World Update at some point. There’s some gorgeous photos and wallpapers and things out there about certain locations in China. This weekend I looked one of them up, and it looked so broken in Flight Sim. It’s like it took that Bing Map data and totally mangled what it looks like. The road was pasted sideways onto a mountain, the beautiful river was melted onto the mountain itself, etc.
It needs another pass! :)
I might wait to do the Silk Road journey until they give that part of the world some more love.
In the meantime, I should do another bush trip. I’m sure for the existing bush trips they’ve chosen places in the world that don’t look like horror melty regions. :)
A grab-bag of stuff, really. Like I said above, I’ve not done much at all recently outside of working hours; I’ve honestly been pretty obsessed with Dyson Sphere Program. But I’ve kept a NeoFly company ticking over, and there have been a few interesting planes released that I’d like to mess with (the Seneca, the Bell 47 – which I guess isn’t really a “plane” – and the P40, in particular).
My flight yesterday I did with Skypark, I wanted to see how that had come along in the past couple months. They’ve added some new missions, and are starting to work on longer term “career” type features, but there’s still not as much meat there as some of the alternatives if you’re not just looking for the “fly any plane anywhere” factor.
Off topic, but try London Heathrow today. Planes are landing and taking off like they’re on a slip and slide.
Crazy. In that live feed something is burning at Heathrow, and it ain’t tiny.
I think I’ll pick up Skypark myself. I’m aware of Neofly et al, but to my shame I’m seduced by the much prettier interface that Skypark has. :D
I just don’t really see the point of it without a career/economy. For me, that’s the entire point of using a third party mission generator. If I just want to fly somewhere, I can do that just fine in game.
I kinda get that. And usually, I feel the same way. But I often find myself fighting analysis paralysis trying to figure out where to fly a lot of the time even if I’m just going to “pick a place”. I’ve found that Skypark’s good for breaking that by giving me some more focused options.
(That said, I’ve been playing with the idea of making a free mission generator with various categories (distance, payload, runway type) as a side project because I’ve never been fully happy with any of them.)
Debating whether to pick up the Seneca with my Bing Rewards credit or hang onto it for later… I already have the Seminole, so not sure how different they’ll be.
I have both. I think I’ve flown the Seneca more in the past 2 days than I’ve flown the Seminole since it came out. It fells more “alive”, plus it’s a much more capable plane. And it has some touches that the Seminole doesn’t, like actual feathering props.
They’re not worlds apart, but I mostly got the Seminole so I could have a piston twin with steam gauges, and ended up feeling like it didn’t have much more going for it. I got the Seneca so I could have a piston twin with steam gauges that can cruise at 200 KTAS at 25000’ and I’ve enjoyed it more.
