probably as a solution for the too intense effects of wind, specially cross wind, while on ground operations like taxiing that users complained about during alfa, but also after MFS’s release, the radial component of wind is zeroed up to a given ground speed, which can be checked using the “Speed” window of the dev console to view the tail / head / cross wind components.
Together with the gradient approach where wind intensity is reduced bellow a given height above ground level to account for surface drag, this approach can indeed make taxiing and initial takeoff run easier to cope with, but it’s, imo, a disguise and a way of hiding the inability of the ground physics model to deal with crosswind.
To replicate, as Murmur from the AVSIM forum first demonstrated to me, simply set manually or by going into a runway where a significative x-wind component is present in real world weather, enter dev mode, open the aircraft editor “Speed” window and track reported x-wind speed. Even if, say, a 20 knot effective x-wind is present the value will read zero and slowly start increasing as your ground speed increases, becoming close to the true component as you gain ground speed.
Irrespective of this even at relatively low cross wind speeds the aircraft in MFS are very difficult to control.
Would be great to see a better implementation of ground physics in this particular respect.
The three pictures bellow were taken with the aircraft stopped in the first one, moving along the taxiway at around 9 knot ground speed on the 2nd, and at aroud 23 knot ground speed in the last one, where the x-wind component had risen to 9knot, making the aircraft really difficult to keep aligned with the taxiway centerline…
