I agree that is a solution and the one I choose to employ. A sledge hammer to crack a walnut isn’t particularly useful though
#23 - Takeoff, do a circuit, (extra points for a rectangular flight path), land.
Bonus points for staying on the runway. Additional points for staying, (relatively), near the center line.
Additional bonus points for not getting the NTSB and/or the fire brigade involved or not making your hangar’s maintenance guy angry at the amount of damage you did to “his” aircraft.
Stretch goal: Do it with traffic and ATC.
Additional stretch goal: Live weather, winds, turbulence, and other annoying distractions enabled.
I like to fly the F/A-18 through the Mach loop in North Wales. I’ll also say, using Sky Dolly to record then replay it flying overhead with the camera on the ground is just the
.
To copy @Jimrh1993, stretch goal, try this in low cloud. I have, let’s just say, the good people of Machynlleth were not amused…
no I only did it once. It’s too difficult to stay in front of someone their cockpit window.
But I think it was an A.I.
But would be nice if there was a radio ingame where other pilots could contact you and say “that great keep doing that.”
or “I’m not impressed at all.”
I do know that staying too close behind an airplane that’s about to land, will cause them to cancel or abort landing.
So I don’t do that either.
Sometimes a.i. is bugged with live traffix. they abort endlessly and I can never take off.
But in offline A.I. it all works smoothly.
It’s super fun to reset all your settings and keybinds after an update weee!
honestly, i’m glad theres no in-game voice chat. Ever go into a public discord voice chat and there’s like 90 people in one channel and three quarters of them are just playing soundboards and the rest are just screaming into the mic? yeah…that would be in-game voice comms in MSFS. It would be like walking into a daycare and all the kids were just fed a 2 liter of cola, a large bag of assorted candy and singing “let it go” or “We don’t talk about bruno” all at their own pace.
That gives me a headache just writing about it lol
Tunable radio channels.
I played online games in the 90’s that had tunable communication.
I think it’s biggest limitation was 20 people per channel on what they then called “Vox”
id agree if you could password a frequency. Sure it’s not “realistic” but given asobos penchant for accessibility they’d have some way for someone to join if they don’t know how to manipulate a radio stack. It would be a balancing act for sure and by no means would it be perfect the first time around for whatever solution that gets thought which that some MS nerd greelights.
Or a large bowl full of chocolate covered espresso beans? How about an office cooler filled with NOS, (It makes Red Bull look like dishwater), or Monster?
Naw. . . That’d be unconstitutional - cruel and unusual punishment, not to mention a direct violation of The Hague Convention Against Torture. ![]()
yeah i forgot to get tickets to the Geneva convention. Couldn’t afford airfare
This is why I only fly on VATSIM. We filter out the simple casuals who just want to troll.
Talking via text chat, by pinging another player as request for communication, which can be easily denied.
Sounds like a fun idea. but I don’t think there is such a possibility in mfs?
Offroad Rally to get a sneak-peek for the oncoming The Crew 3? ![]()
I’m a weirdo. I have the most fun using SPAD to figure out how to eliminate mouse clicks in the virtual cockpit. I want EVERYTHING mapped to my peripherals. It’s difficult (and sometimes seems impossible, what with all the VAR’s that remain inaccessible) but to me it’s more rewarding than nailing a difficult landing.
The downside is that, until I can afford a good augmented reality headset, I stay away from VR and fly in a 2D world.
Maybe I am a weirdo too. I just fly all kind off planes and just enjoy the scenery a bit.
Dont do Vatsim anymore and dont take the rest to serious as well.
From my side, i give way to all landing traffic when Iam about to take off and just waiting at the holding point, so i wont block the runway or distract them in their crucial part of the fight.
I dont expect that from others because thats what happens at “all players on”.
I also dont mind at all being intercepted by mach 2 F14’s or whatever plane can keep up. I even like a bit of company during my flights and always rock my wings or flash the landinglights to say hello and welcome them on my journey.
As long as they dont fly right in front of the window in the landing phase (+/- 1000 feet above ground) its al great and fun. Some do even inverted escorts on the captains side all the way to the runway, its hilarious.
*disclaimer, I might be a bit bussy on the descent, approach and landing phase so during that time my respons might be a bit late or not at all. But that doesnt mean i wont notice all the crazy stunts.
That’s why I like the Saitek/Logitech X52. It has a zillion buttons and axes so I can map most everything to something on the controller and not have to take my hands off the stick.
Side note:
Autocorrect on my phone is a hoot! Some of the substitutions are so hysterical.
When I wanted to say “a zillion buttons” above, it insisted that I wanted to say “a zillion beers”, no matter what I did. (That would explain my abysmal landings!) ![]()
if you ever need/want a throttle upgrade, i DEFINITELY recommend the new STECS MAX (or standard depending on your budget). Buttons for days, can be configured for military, commercial, civilian and space planes, detents (i have a profile set for airbus so i have physical feedback for setting power in airbus, 30 seconds to swap before you start). I have mapped a disgusting amount of commands to the button box via spad next to the 737 (you need to enable some dev mode or something, there is a spad guide on their wiki for it) to enable several commands at once. I on occasion fly in VR so these are useful when it comes to need to feel around for buttons. Far more buttons than what you have now. The included software in and of itself is incredibly powerful, but has a bit of a curve much like Spad. Using both of those you’ll never have to touch a keyboard or mouse again.
It’s also fun to play realistic. But waiting for the take off approval in certain live traffic mode, is bugged, There can be several planes which constantly fly around and abbort landing in an endless loop of abborting without any obstacles on the runway. I even looked with drone camera if there is anything on there, and no nothing. They endlessly abort landing for no reason. Me especially not being anywhere near the landing runway. Including a huge traffic of airplanes behind me also waiting to take off.
So I switched to A.I. traffic and it’s super stable, realistic and fully functional now.
But I still find navigation and landing difficult. I tried xplane navigation system and managed to get it working, but there is stil some landing rules and air traffic rules that i dont know anything about. I started on xcloud and some of the tutorials were bugged so I didn’t advance. But even in the tutorials the navigation is already automatically set. And I don’t know how to set it up by myself.
And I assume in real life people have maps of the airport, for taxi purposes. Taxi’ng without the airport map is pretty confusing at time. Not to mention trying to see all the letter number combination with controller camera. I made it easier with mapping, but still confusing without a map. But I Can simply download the map from google. The landing rules and navigation abilities, I don’t really know how to do that.
The most difficult thing to do is land without navigation system on dark night low clouds with near zero. I ask direction to airport and its like 3 o clock 5 miles. And I fly low with all lights and I come across the runway and see it, but then I have to calculate to perfection the airspeed and compass. to make a perfect loop which ends up completely blindly on the right trajectory for landing on that runway. By just using compass and airspeed indicator. But super fun to learn with save games to have multiple attempts.
I fly without ATC and AI traffic. Just live “real” players. I dont rely on the ATC because of all the issues and AI because of your mentioned bugs.
Vfr fights i only do in the right “real world” circumstances and IFR/low vis with the right equipment.
I certainly love the dc6 by pmdg, for example to test my nav skills with beacons, charts etc, also in low vis/night, bad weather. I never fly this lady with GPS, just old school.
But normally beside my dc6 adventures all my IFR flights are done with the pmdg 737/8 or the fenix a320. These planes make it just to easy to navigate during these circumstances. Just file the plan in simbrief, follow the magenta line and if possible handfly the aproach, 1000ft final, or the minimums depending on my mood. Never an autoland… i like the challenge and thrill of landing way to much.