Dumb question but um...

[pa4tim]

I can read German and fly for most German planes. The reason I do not often fly the Russian planes is the same as his. I like to use the instruments in the cockpit for the best immersion. All cockpits have a different layout and a lot of meters. In a German or English labeled cockpit I must also search for the meter I need, but I can do that quick because I can read in a flash what is labeled or printed on the scale. Often you only need to see the global position of the needle.  But if you are imperial in a non labeled metric cockpit. it is harder. 

 

For the metric pilots like me. If I see an imperial scale that does not have "end of scale is bad" I first need to think if it is in (back or front) yards, (man or woman)feet, (sea or land)miles, inches, Fahrenheit,  stone and did they use knots  too ? (and then the alien scales for things like pressure and the weird stuff like "the plane is 2/3rd of a yard, 5 feet and 4+1/8 inch long"   ,things they like to do. ?) 

 

But most important, most times hugging the end of the scale is bad. So if I read Celsius or Fahrenheit and the needle is in the red I know it is some temperature and it is bad. Not all planes have labels so for many non-German planes you have the same problem.  If you need the labels you only need to learn a few German words (for oil, water, fuel, pressure, altitude, speed) But often you can translate it indirect. If the scale is Celsius and you can not read the label it will be oil temp because water is the same in German. ) If it is km/h it only can be speed, if it is km it must be altitude. Many meters are easy recognizable without an external label.  

 

In Russian cockpits I do need something like the picture above. I can not read anything and that is indeed totally killing the submersion for me, if I want to fly it as manual as possible.  On Cyrillic scales I do not even know what unit it shows. But it must be metric so scales numbers and things like colors will help me there.  And I rather learn the location of the instruments that show metric values as that I can recognize meters in a flash but then have to convert values to mean something to me. Also, I think, Russian planes have not as much meters as German planes. 

 

But I know it will be almost impossible to redesign all meters and scales printed on them in Cyrillic, Metric, Imperial and all possible languages

 

Edited July 9, 2019 by pa4tim

[Max_von_Wuthenau]

On 6/18/2019 at 6:53 AM, danielprates said:

 

Those wacky germans.... not happy with coining the term "weltschmerz", they had to come up with another one that means almost the same thing!

Actually ☝️, Lebensmüde means literally Suicidal. Weltschmerz describes more of the depressed view of life you are referring to, and by no means is the same thing! And i am a wacky German, so i know ?

[danielprates]

2 hours ago, Max_von_Wuthenau said:

Actually ☝️, Lebensmüde means literally Suicidal. Weltschmerz describes more of the depressed view of life you are referring to, and by no means is the same thing! And i am a wacky German, so i know ?

 

Welcome to the forum! 

Yeah I know, that was me trying to score a cheap joke.