TL;DR - I have videos of just how extreme your glider flying can get when you realize how the game wind and thermals are actually working and start exploiting it. I highly doubt the type of flights I did the night before this OP would be possible. I’m pretty sure the aircraft would break-up. But in those eventual threads we can discuss all that.
Ok, I’m certainly not a glider expert and never flown a glider in real life: big thanks to some glider pilots in other threads who pushed me to work harder on getting the flying right so I could test this stuff at all.
I extensively (12 hours?) tested the SU12 thermal system flying around in the game, so obviously this is my game experience and not an attempt to question its fidelity to real world.
In short, clouds are terrain. It’s that simple, and they form a ridge and there’s a wind and a ridge thermal component to the cloud. The cloud ground level is the bottom of the cloud layer and therefore it seems the wind and updraft components above that layer obey the same or similar rules to as if there was a wind and sunny side of a hill or mountain ridge.
If you make the clouds extreme (cumulus from 1,000 to 60,000 feet) the thermal, if you can even call it that, gets stretched out almost vertically. It doesn’t get sucked into the cloud and in fact there’s almost no actual thermal component to the cloud itself.
I can demonstrate that and actually have game video that this is the case. A thermal you should be able to spiral and compensate for wind. Inside the cloud the only component is wind. You can’t spiral it because there is no meaningful updraft component, therefore when you’re headwind you get lift and when you’re tailwind you get sink and it’s basically that linear. When you control your stall speed it becomes quite flyable.
It would appear it’s a thermal and mechanically it’s probably not important where the lift is coming from but I think programmatically I was able to demonstrate this.
Furthermore I know about what knots wind speed generates sufficient lift and it also seems to confirm that inside the cloud there’s really no noticeable thermal. Wind is king.
Outside the cloud is a different story and where the wind and the thermal mechanics collide can be absolutely insane. I think in real life it’d tear your glider apart; but I figured out how to fly it and fly through it none the less.
Oh and I’d like to emphasize that Asobo said that their thermals would be wind driven and certainly below the cloud deck it is. But the cloud thermal is a “ridge thermal” and it’s as if wind hit a wall, it’s not wind driven. The thermal doesn’t lean-to.
Below the cloud deck the thermal rises from a ground/sea level to the leading edge of the cloud. It’s inaccurate (so I am told) but to be fair I actually think there’s a gamer reason for this. If the thermal lined up perfectly into the cloud it would make it exceedingly difficult to give players a safer experience. In the current method it takes you into and through the cloud spitting you out on the other side.
I’ve seen very little variance to this, these type of thermals all seem to work the same and start somewhere aft the front and terminate somewhere ahead of the cloud, toward the front.
Thermals are absolutely, as Asobo says, dependent upon cloud density. I have yet to experiment with a cloud from 59,000 feet to 60,000 feet to discover if this cloud affects thermals on the ground. But if it’s anything like the wind mechanic; I bet it does.
Ridge thermals seem about what anyone would expect them to be and so understanding that in the cloud deck they basically work the same way was a flight-changer for me as my extreme videos will detail.