In-game the speedometer shows several regions that have different implications for plane handling:
the white-line “safe to work flaps/gear” speeds
green “safe speed”
yellow “faster than is economical/optimal but your plane won’t fall apart”
red “slow the hell down because we can’t sustain this”
I can’t find anything in the SimConnect variables lists that lets me either get the boundaries for those speeds, or even accurate “are we past this particular kind of speed” (for instance, even while redlining a cessna 310R, the FLAP_SPEED_EXCEEDED still happily reports 0, telling us it’s safe to use flaps, even though extending flaps will kill you pretty much immediately).
Is there any way to query what speed category the plane is in, or what the various transition speeds are similar to looking up DESIGN_SPEED_VS1, etc?
(It feels like there’s a slew of DESIGN_SPEED_[…] values missing, maybe those can be added in a future simconnect update? =S)
noted. That still leaves the problem of getting those green/yellow/red boundaries. For example, the King Air 350i has a simconnect-indicated cruise speed of 175 knots. At 180, it tears itself apart and it’s a “restart, or go to main menu?”, so a simple external autopilot really wants to fly it much slower than 175, but there’s nothing that I can find to guide what that should be.
same, which is why I’d dearly like to know what the game thinks safe/caution/omgno speeds are, as opposed to what the real world specs say they are (plus, an autopilot doesn’t care what plane it’s running for as long as it has the values it needs, so there’s no hardcoding a list of every possible plane in MSFS, it has to work with what it can get via SimConnect)