Yeah, you’re right; you can bind Refuel and Repair to a keypress and use that to “refuel”. But that’s a huge immersion breaker. You can do that anywhere, even in mid-air. But currently that’s the only way to refuel during a bush trip. And you absolutely have to refuel on most of them or you’ll run out of gas.
You can also call a fuel truck and/or drive up to a fuel pump at a runway… and then they won’t refuel you even though they will if you’re not in a bush flight. You can’t fill up part way, even though I’d like to for most bush trips.
True. They might as well have made it just auto refuel on landing. There should have been an achievement for running out of fuel on one’s first bush trip. Just to see what % of people did it.
I mean Repair and Refuel isn’t automatically bound to anything. It’s not obvious you can’t fill up at runways. If you’re flying the Savage Cub (as you do for the Sierra Nevada bush trip), the fuel gauges are really hard to see from inside the cockpit, so it’s not even obvious you’re using fuel. I remember way back at launch everyone was flailing trying to figure out how to finish these things until someone figured out the keybind trick. We assumed that was something that would be resolved pretty quickly. Apparently not a hi pri.
As do Flight Simulator players, apparently. So I don’t blame them exactly. They have been working on fantastic stuff in the meantime. It’s amazing what a relatively small team has accomplished here.
Yep, when I ran out of fuel in the first trip it was a WTF? To the internet! Moment. I forgot the key wasn’t even bound initially.
When I went back and finished Nevada not long ago I noticed on the achievement only something like 0.7% competed it. I bet a huge number of players bounced off it because of the fuel thing.
Well, that, and the broken achievements. Remember, I finished the trip, and never used the “back to whatever” feature, but never got the achievement for finishing it.
I think I finished the last leg 20 times to try to get the achievement.
I had the achievement, but don’t anymore for some reason. The central experience of flying and viewing scenery in FS2020 is sublime, but almost everything around it is broken in one way or another. The autopilot still doesn’t work reliably. (If I, for instance, punch up level flight in the X Cub, then try to change heading, it will try to return me to my original heading. And if I disable the autopilot at any point, then try to reenable it, it will aggressively try to kill me. These have been issues since the beginning.) Flight logs are touch and go (heh). Every time there’s an update I get stuck in the Press Any Key loop and have to do several PC resets and folder deletions to resolve it. Etc.
I only tried autopilot once, and yeah, I was pretty surprised at its insistence on trying to kill me. It was like a scene out of a science fiction horror movie. I wonder what I did to piss it off so badly?
Ha, you guys have cool photos and stories and I’m still trying to graduate from flight school. I’m up to completing my first solo takeoff and landing, or the last flying lesson before tackling VFR. And I can do it, but I can’t get better than a B grade because I’m having difficulty managing my speed. It wants me to take off and get to a certain altitude, which is not a big deal. But getting there at a certain speed and maintaining that speed is proving to be difficult - I’m all over the place with speed, bouncing between going too fast and too slow and not managing a nice steady speed. Maybe this is one of those things that’s just tougher playing with a controller.
1000% I don’t remember how the controller manages throttle, but with a return-to-center joystick or button, it’s gonna be hard. Are you on XBox? Do you have access to a keyboard/mouse? It might be worth binding throttle to mousewheel+button or something if you don’t have a joystick. If you need a joystick, the all-time classic Logitech Extreme 3D Pro (which is what I use) is back in stock and reasonably priced again. They’re certainly not ideal (I’d love rudder pedals, a non-return-to-center pitch control, a pitch trim wheel, and a throttle quadrant), but they’re cheap and way better than controller/mouse/keyboard.
EDIT: You really do need good throttle control. For normal level flight, it’s ideal to fine-control ascent and descent rate with your throttle, not your yoke or trim wheel.
I think throttle is A and B to throttle up/down using the controller. I never had a problem, but then I’ve never done the tutorials or tried to maintain a steady velocity like that.
To answer your questions, yes, and I guess I do - I mean I’ve got m+k on my PC. If it gets too frustrating I may give it a shot, but I’m not sure yet that I’m invested enough in Flight Simulator to buy hardware just for playing the game. It’s a lark for me at this point. But, I’ll keep it in mind if things get frustrating.
Yes, that’s all there is to it as far as I know. The problem is I go max throttle for takeoff but that will leave me at a higher speed than requested once I level off at altitude, but I don’t really have a feel for how much ‘B’ is required to reduce speed, since throttling is an analog function and A and B are digital buttons. Maybe it’s a thing I just need to get a feel for as I play more.
Try to get a feel for how your engine tachometer translates to speed for level flight. When you adjust your throttle, you’re directly controlling RPMs (in the Cessna 152 at least), so that’s what you should be looking at.
Well that’s another weird thing, is sometimes during training they’ll ask you to maintain speed at a certain altitude and other times they’ll ask you to maintain RPMs and it kind of throws me to keep an eye on those two dials (not to mention all the other ones) and maintain all within a requested range. But then I guess that’s why it’s training - it kind of reminds me of learning to drive, ‘holy crap, I need to keep my eyes on my speed and my direction and the cars ahead of me and the cars behind me all at the same time??’
Press the View/Back button to switch to 3rd person.
I know you want to stay in 1st person, but the 3rd person HUD is wonderful. It shows you where you’re setting the throttle, so you can adjust it better.
Take a moment on the ground to zoom on in the throttle control and see how many taps or how long a press it takes to move the throttle through it’s whole range to get a feel for how much the input changes it.
Target ~75% throttle for cruise.
