Every once and a while I want to do a max range trip. It’s a nice little sense of accomplishment when you complete a 6 hour trip in a C172, or a 16 hour trip in a 747. And yes, sometimes that just means setting the autopilot, going to bed, and setting your alarm to make sure you come back in time to start the descent.
But the longer the flight, it seems that the more bugs creep into the system, mainly in terms of display. For example, last night I started a flight from Buenos Aires to Sydney, and went to bed. This morning, any changes to the autopilot are not reflected on any display, either on the A/P panel or in the PFD. Changing AP modes (turning switching to VNAV, FLC, etc) does not cause the indicator lights to turn on or off. So you can turn the dials to change speed, altitude etc., you can hear the clicks, but the target altitude, speed bugs, and so forth do not display anywhere. But the aircraft will change altitude, speed etc - you just have no idea when it will stop.
Other bugs that appear over time are PFDs permanently freezing, or autothrottles ceasing to work, or autotrim settings getting maxed, even though the CG is within tolerances.
If we could save a flight in progress, shut down and restart MSFS and reload the flight from where we left off everything would work fine. But we don’t have that. Is there any other way to give the sim a digital equivalent of a slap to try to reset things on the fly?