Microsoft Flight Sim 2020

[DD_Arthur]

59 minutes ago, Feathered_IV said:

Nearly forgot it’s the Australia update today. Veeery tempted by the Ford Trimotor.  

 

Oz update available now ?

[ZachariasX]

1 hour ago, Feathered_IV said:

Nearly forgot it’s the Australia update today. Veeery tempted by the Ford Trimotor.  

[AndyJWest]

1 hour ago, Feathered_IV said:

Nearly forgot it’s the Australia update today. Veeery tempted by the Ford Trimotor.  

 

Fokker!

[Feathered_IV]

1 hour ago, AndyJWest said:

 

Fokker!

How rude!  Oh, wait...

[Gambit21]

20 hours ago, CUJO_1970 said:

That was a rather large update.

 

 

 

 

[Monostripezebra]

I went ahead and bought the Fokker F VII.. I just love old planes. It sure has its weaknesses.. but also at a moderate price it is has a lot of versions and some nice aspects. In the end, it doesn´t even matter that the floatplane version has no gear and is not amphibious but water only:

 

It just takes full power to taxi..

Edited February 4, 2022 by Monostripezebra

[ZachariasX]

4 hours ago, Monostripezebra said:

It just takes full power to taxi..

Some rewiever found that the single engine variant is almost laking the power to fly at all. Is that true? I am still unsure whether to get that one.

[Feathered_IV]

I decided to skip it after watching AVangel’s review.  I heard the DC-3 is likely to be out this month though, so I think I’ll save my sim dollars for that. 

[ZachariasX]

48 minutes ago, Feathered_IV said:

I decided to skip it after watching AVangel’s review.  I heard the DC-3 is likely to be out this month though, so I think I’ll save my sim dollars for that. 

That is what I have seen as well.

[Monostripezebra]

On 2/4/2022 at 7:36 AM, ZachariasX said:

Some rewiever found that the single engine variant is almost laking the power to fly at all. Is that true? I am still unsure whether to get that one.

 the single engine variant is certainly massively underpowered, but I must say I find it very fun, sometimes. But yeah, under certain athmospheric conditions it definately runs out of climb, usually it climbs somewhat between 100-120 km/h but not much at all and any sideslipping makes it suffer hard.. and that makes for some very interesting challenges but once you are high enough its fine. But it is kind of an oversight to not model the slip indicator clearly in the cockpit for such an energy-sensitve aircraft.

 

Overall, with the fokker you get a very simple, basic no-systems aircraft that only flies (stick&rudder&throttle) with moderate eycandy. But while the flightmodel is far from perfect, I feel it subjectively fits well enough to make the plane fun, from my point of view, it is kind of like a weird bushplane in a way.. with terrible groundhandling. But it is fun.

 

 

Edited February 5, 2022 by Monostripezebra

[CUJO_1970]

I love crappy old airplanes like that.

[Monostripezebra]

18 hours ago, CUJO_1970 said:

I love crappy old airplanes like that.

 

Me too. Infact the single engine Fokker FVII is probably the best of the bunch.

And that Fokker has kinda direkt heritage to flying circus, beeing in large part designed as trimotor by Reinhold Platz, a Fokker employee since the Johannestal days who introduced the welded steel fuselages to fokker and of Dr.1 and D7 fame.

 

I think, I know what happened in the AVangel video.. you can energy-trap the single engine Fokker behind the powercurve. Between 80-90ish Km/h the aircraft gets into a weird state where you kinda can sustain level flight with slightly pulled elevator but you instantly exceed the power available if you pull more and sink and relaxing the stick a little does not increase speed enough. If you fly with high AoA, it is absolutely unrecoverable and the only real way out there is nose down and getting back into the 100ish speed region where you can climb again. Combined with a super effecive energy depleting sideslip, it is very easy to get into inescaple situations down low in this aircraft, which makes it kinda interesting to fly.

 

I kind of replicated that here with a sketchy test takeoff

 

 

Edited February 5, 2022 by Monostripezebra

[CUJO_1970]

I'm definitely buying that little Fokker.

[ZachariasX]

Had to fetch some other oldie than the Fokker:

 

 

AvAngel made a short review about it. It kind of left me with mixed feeling, but you simply can't not have a Bücker in your sim. And I have to agree, it is made very pretty with a lot of different liveries. But a real Bücker is yellow and black, hence there was ony one choice really.

 

I made some short flights with it and it was hilarious, that thing flies like a PC-6 Turbo Porter. That awful Hirth engine (less a mean for locomotion, but a therapeutic end in itself for people with a compulsive urge to service engines) with 105 HP gives it 8+ m/s climb! ?

 

Oh well. Something must be really wrong. First, lets check what we have so far, just after release.

 

 

The plane is simply beautiful. It still has the old all metric dash, but with some extras. Fuel cock (lower left, long lever with the red handle) works. I pull that to open the fuel flow. Then there's the throttle next to it and I crack it a bit to be ready for startup. On the same quadrant the mixture lever. Full forward for rich, as you need it for startup. Then the flightsick and to the right is the trim lever. It is very sensitive. Just next to it bottm right (cut from this view angle) is the radio. On the dash, lower left is the pitot heater (I will select taht befor tackeoff, the mag switch as we know it, and as a red button to the left of mag position 1+2 is the starter button. But flick on battery first; the switch on top of the mag switch. Position lights switch to the far right on the dash. Below the dash on the right is what I think is the primer button. It moves, but the engine starts readily without priming. Just press start some 3 seconds.

 

 

The front seat is more rudimentary, as it should be. Left over metric altimeters are popular in this place. Rpm meter to the right outside the cockpit. Usually, this is the only rpm meter. We have a luxurious backseat that also features an additional rpm meter. Fuel level is meter with the rod in front. We have 50% fuel now. This should actually be so in flight with the aircraft level. Tail down, you can't use this to read the fuel level. Ah well. A first entry for the bugtracker.

 

Back in the cockpit now. I did some circles in the default loadout that were hillariously off wat the real aircraft does. Also, I found the tail wheel lock, although present, doesn't work. But since I do not push ths bird around, it's fine to have it in locked postition. But another entry to the bugtracker. The performance is really off and it made me take another look at the W&B sheet.

 

Oh well. 300 kg empty, not even 500 kg T/O weight with fuel and crew. Guys, seriously? The Lycoming powered Bücker 131 got some 20 kg on the Hirth one. And that Bücker has an empty weight of 485 kg, on which you calculate PIC, PAX, and bagagge. MTOW is 670 kg! you can see that when you have two 90 kg dudes, you will not have much fuel aboard when allowing the reserve for an alternate. The added power of the Lycoming offsets a lot of these shortomings by allowing a relatively heavy aircraft. But I had to play a bit on the W&B sheet to make the aircraft reasonably heavy:

 

 

A 91 kg PIC needs a 200 kg PAX and a full tank to come close to what you have in real life in such an aircraft. Weight distribution has to be like this, else CoG is off. Now let's try again.

 

 

 

Run-up worked fine, some 1100 rpm required for taxiing. Brakes work well. The real aircraft is a bit mor prone to noseover when you brake hard, you want the stick back in your belly at all times when on the ground.

 

 

 

At this weight, the Bücker behaves MUCH more realistic. A slight push forward to raise the tail and you correct the gyro with the rudder and keep balance with the airerons. I would bet the devs sat in a Bücker. The particular way it heaves and leans is beautifully recreated. Also take off run distance is way more plausible.

 

 

Some 130+ km/h and she can do some 4+ m/s climb. at full power. Now things are as they shoudl be. They still represent more a Lycoming Bücker then the Hirth.

 

 

Yes, that looks about right.

 

 

I turn in the downwind, throttle back, turn into final. 65 km/h approach speed says the online Checklist. Mwahahahahahahahaha! Thats when gliders stop flying. Nah, some 110+ km/h and it flies well. The sink rate on idle I find very suitable. It really comes down rather steep when throttled all the way back. But now I am draging it in a shallow manner, passing the fence at 100 km/h and flair out until stick is all the way back.

 

 

It only takes slight braking, just letting it roll for most of the runway until it stops. How the aircraft lands is also very nicely made. It has a very peculiar way of how you sink down behind that engine once the aircraft settles. That is very nice and very genuine to the aircraft.

 

But now, some aerobatics, that is what this crate is for. For this, some comments about the real Bücker:

 

It really follows the pilot input such that you can exert maneuvers with great confidence and the responses the aircraft gives you are intuitive if you are familiar with aircraft of neural trim.

 

The real aircraft is somewhat stable in the pitch axis. It is neutral in both yaw and roll axis and keeping her on course is always like keepingher in balance. Stick forces are moderately light at low speeds to heavy when you are (too) fast. As little input is needed you can fly her with two fingers. The stick forces at 175 km/h (your normal cruise speed) compare with a Thrustmaster Warthog, but differ in that the Bücker has no center position. Hence you can well fly the plane with two fingers, but this is due to the fact that you will not move the top of the stick more than one centimer.

 

Roll for just banking her to go places induces no adverse yaw to speak off. If you make full deflection, like an eight with 60° to 60° bank (maybe at 150 km/h), then you need considerable foot to keep the ball centered. Maybe 2/3rd of the whole travel which is an easy thing to do.

 

Just depressing left or right all the way makes the nose go left or right lihe a gun turret, maybe some 20° (difficult to judge), but there is very little induced roll, a slight bank occurs.

 

Most important is that when you do coarse aileron or yaw inputs, the ball will almost linearly go out of center according to your input. It will not wobble away to one side. It is very much on rails. You deflect the stick for roll, and as a direct funtion of that the ball will move. If you "step on the ball" you can move it directly back to the center. It is as is you had a bowden cable to move the ball.

 

This precision in control, despite being modestly powered and old, gives a very gratifying feel and (at least to me) it oozes confidence to an unhealthy degree. (At least to me.) But as long as you can see outside, you feel safe and happy.

 

It is just a wonderful crate.

 

Now about the sim Bücker.

 

 

I ventured out over where we can do aerobatics along the border to Germany, near Constance. Just doing it over town etc. is frowned upon. At 2000 m, I started with some rolls. The roll is a tad slow, but I might have to time that for a definitive assessment. That the rudder induces a roll about 1/3rd of aileron roll is not right. On average it handles well, but it surely lacks the precision in control the real aircraft has. A general issue among all sims that a kick in one direction may indce some wobble in the other two axes. Subtle, but it shouldn't be that much.

 

 

Loops work well, but it is noticeable that you hardly need any foot over the top of the loop, where in the real aircraft the gyro will make you turn if you don't compensate for it.

 

 

Hammerheads also readily work. they are difficult to nicely perform in the real aircraft in the sense of the gyor and hardly possible against the gyro of the prop. Here, if you pull up some 70°, then it works well to the right. To the left it wants to roll and you have to counter with hard aileron input to counter it.

 

It also spins readily.

 

Overall, it is not bad. The ground handling and take off and landing is very, very charming and close to the real thing. really, surprisingly good. Same as just "regular flying, provided you put in the right weights. It is lacking precision in control, but not in an obscene way as the ASOBO Pitts. It have to say it is a beautifull aircraft and if they correct some fundamental errors it is really a nice product. In the current form, it is very obvious that it is an initial release.

 

Still, I like it.

 

Edited February 5, 2022 by ZachariasX

[Monostripezebra]

^^That looks really neat...

 

 

On a sidenote: anyone wondering what is up with Reno Racing: the guys over at the discord discovered that you can gain a ton of speed by wriggling the plane up and down, leading to previouse unseen leaderboard times and very silly flying:

 

 

 

Meanwhile, I have gone over to re-do the landing challenges.. but trevor jacob style with engine out dramatisation

 

 

[Gambit21]

I’d love to fly around Svalbard!

 

[ZachariasX]

14 hours ago, Monostripezebra said:

On a sidenote: anyone wondering what is up with Reno Racing: the guys over at the discord discovered that you can gain a ton of speed by wriggling the plane up and down, leading to previouse unseen leaderboard times and very silly flying:

The wobble strikes back.

 

I think Jörgs team underestimated what you get away with in „regular flying“ FM wise vs. putting the thing is a competitive environment like racing or air combat. I mean, apart from doing laps aganst yout own times is ok, the rest is just silly.

 

On a side note, I wonder how many dozens (?) of g‘s would correspond to a, say, 5 degrees AoA at 500 mph.

[Lusekofte]

15 hours ago, Gambit21 said:

I’d love to fly around Svalbard!

 

I live north of the Arctic circle. Many landscapes is not filled in. Like a kind of replacement standin.

I wonder if it is the same with Svalbard

[Monostripezebra]

On 2/11/2022 at 7:30 AM, ZachariasX said:

The wobble strikes back.

 

I think Jörgs team underestimated what you get away with in „regular flying“ FM wise vs. putting the thing is a competitive environment like racing or air combat. I mean, apart from doing laps aganst yout own times is ok, the rest is just silly.

 

On a side note, I wonder how many dozens (?) of g‘s would correspond to a, say, 5 degrees AoA at 500 mph.

 

considering the galloping ghost tragedy I think switching full down and up trims alternating can´t be so different to losing a trim tab and very dangerous.. Voodoo had the same thing happen but the pilot recovered after 10g pitchup..  But I am overall less mad at the FM-abusable-weirdness, which, while it should not happen, can happen.. but the overall lack of effort to make the racing a bit more robust against the most simple ways of messing with it, just basic competative fairness things.

 

It honestly feels like they did not really thing/research the challenges of making a multiplayer racing game at all.. and had robustness against abusive mechanisms either in-game or in simple "skript kiddie" style with file or hexeditors even on the screen.. Apparently you can just add fuel states to the flt. files, so you can for instance make your plane a ton lighter for landing challenges etc. I really feel they fell for the temptation of "hey, we got a working sim, reno got a working race thing, lets just throw it together and add some bling, shouldn´t be much work" fallacy. I mean if testing did not even show them that there were obvious abuse mechanisms even in default key settings... they either did not think about it, or did not care.

I don´t even think we have yet discovered all potential abuse mechanisms yet. It´s funny how something simple like "jetborne racing" is so much more robust and viable as racing game.

 

 

Well.. at least silly busflying is still very very much fun and the Bell 47, too.

 

 

 

[CUJO_1970]

Definitely a few more buttons to push on this thing but it's a blast so far. I have a lot to learn:

 

 

 

 

 

[DBFlyguy]

 

[Monostripezebra]

I still love the Bell.. autorotations are addictive.

 

[IckyATLAS]

The car models in the parking where the Heli lands are just horrible blotches. I thought that MSFS 2020 was much better than that. The visual quality is terrible.

[ZachariasX]

1 hour ago, IckyATLAS said:

The car models in the parking where the Heli lands are just horrible blotches. I thought that MSFS 2020 was much better than that. The visual quality is terrible.

They are not models but just photogrammetry. You can place highly detailed models of cars anywhere. But doing so as a priority in all places where zebras might venture, that would be a poor management decision I guess. Especially since the default sim has to fit in an XBox. There‘s addons for nice cars, ships etc that are then placed in the sim world.

[Lusekofte]

17 hours ago, IckyATLAS said:

The car models in the parking where the Heli lands are just horrible blotches. I thought that MSFS 2020 was much better than that. The visual quality is terrible.

I find low slow low flying in this sim more realistic compared to any other sim. Ground texture in GB ruin much of the fun with daylight flying in the po2

[CUJO_1970]

On 2/21/2022 at 1:44 AM, IckyATLAS said:

The car models in the parking where the Heli lands are just horrible blotches. I thought that MSFS 2020 was much better than that. The visual quality is terrible.

 

You can change it for $8.99

[CUJO_1970]

I will say, you do indeed need NASA computer, NASA download capability and NASA storage space for this beast.

[DD_Arthur]

2 hours ago, CUJO_1970 said:

I will say, you do indeed need NASA computer, NASA download capability and NASA storage space for this beast.

Yep, but if you run at 1080p you can use Alan Shepard’s computer.?

[Monostripezebra]

On 2/22/2022 at 1:35 AM, LuseKofte said:

I find low slow low flying in this sim more realistic compared to any other sim. Ground texture in GB ruin much of the fun with daylight flying in the po2

 

Well.. in the end the photometrics have positive and negative sides.. I mean it looks absolutely amazing for what we can do now from 200m distance, but closer and closer it off course it gets bad. Flying over paris is in a helicopter is way cool, but off course it only works with some distance. The ai-car traffic has nothing to do with the blocky photometric scanned car-artefacts, though, that is just what you get with real world data generation that way.

 

Some more Paris autorotating..

 

[DD_Arthur]

Between Le Bourget and London City....

 

[Monostripezebra]

The Portunhol-Update has so many nice photometrics. And some little things to fly through!

 

 

[Gambit21]

On 2/20/2022 at 6:18 PM, Monostripezebra said:

I still love the Bell.. autorotations are addictive.

 

 

 

This is about as close as I care to get to San Francisco anymore - thanks.

[DD_Arthur]

‘Frisco? Try Iceland. Much more relaxing....

 

[ZachariasX]

35 minutes ago, DD_Arthur said:

Frisco? Try Iceland. Much more relaxing....

You were lucky with the weather then. last time I attempted a flight there, i as well might have let the aircraft up on a cable.

[Gambit21]

4 hours ago, DD_Arthur said:

‘Frisco? Try Iceland. Much more relaxing....

 

 

MUCH!!!

[Bremspropeller]

Anybody got this already?

 

 

Cessna Twins are usually very cool...

[Veteran66]

i am waiting for this Beauty 

 

 

 

more Infos here:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1441405542

[AndyJWest]

11 minutes ago, Veteran66 said:

i am waiting for this Beauty 

 

Me too.

[CUJO_1970]

Had to get this one as soon as I saw it:

 

 

Checking new Alaska mesh in the Cessna:

 

Edited April 2, 2022 by CUJO_1970

[CUJO_1970]

A little more practice with the noob-friendly Twin Otter:

 

 

Can't fly for shyt? Twin otter got your back: