MSFS Cannonball Run Challenge (KJFK to KLAX in a GA plane for charity) [Prize from Microsoft]

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And I understand that. Not even talking about what it grew into.

But the guys who didn’t ‘win’ fought much harder than the guys that did. And that means that in the future the rules might need some tweeks. It’s completely your system, I get that. I’m not looking for you to undo what already happened. I’m just pointing you at things you might improve in the future. 3 hours of loss isn’t fun. I don’t think that is a good example of high risk/high reward when the bragging right is the ‘reward’. We can disagree on that. It was your event, and not mine.

Just the same, should my name come up in the draw… Give it to DDawg. Of the pilots I interacted with, he was doing the most work to do it right. And he deserves recognition for that.

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yeah, some times I get set in my stubborn ways … but I don’t JUST give up … I knew something was amiss, but I never looked far enough into the issue at the time … and from what I was seeing at the time wasn’t really obvious … For me being awake at 3 to make sure I was functional enough to fly at 5, and I screwed that up too …

Like I said, I learned a lot about my piloting skills on the 26th! so it was a miserable day … but I had fun… and I never let me have the long boring trip I did today … and I even had to event challenges to do … like how many rolls can I do in a cub … How long and low will the cub fly inverted … crazy stuff like that … The amazing part, I didn’t crash, taking stupidity too far … usually it was my computer … and I have a really good system … so I was miffed about having to reduce graphics settings to ensure the machine wouldn’t crash more than normal …

As for the Prize, I did nothing any more than any of you guys did … except letting my ego get in the way … that, and being a quasi-noob for the understanding of this version of Flight Simulator. It truly is a great piece of software, and when it gets further along, IT WILL BE an EYE OPENER to the sim world … but, there is a real learning curve, that most will not make an effort to learn about. The more I learn about where MS/ASOBO are striving to take this software, It would be a shame to water it down, making it arcade-ish.

Trust me when I say, I am my biggest critic, as I pride myself on being a semi-decent pilot … and when my old grey braincell caused me grief, and when I found out how easy it was to correct the problem … I beat myself up pretty good …

But, I take away from this a lot of stuff, I was exposed to, I got a better understanding of how to deal with ICING … DON"T … not in a cub. anything below ONE DEGREE, get out of dodge … I laterally had no choice … learn it or, quit. I had basic understanding, but I learned to become more intimate and comfortable with it … for as much as I could for the hours I had to spend flying it. That alone was a big deal for me to get a better understanding with …

Who said old dawgs cant learn new tricks …

And the amount of Flight time I got flying IFR… It was amazing …
I was busier than a one-armed man in a juggling contest …

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1163

I dropped this in discord this afternoon but realized I didn’t drop this here. I added a KML export function to GoRace. Just add /replay/YourSimAirHandle.kml and it’ll download so you can replay the flight with altitude. It’s pretty basic as I wrote it in an hour, but it does the trick. (I can’t post links to the forums so that’ll have to do for directions!)

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1164

https://gorace.net/replay/SeedyL.kml

See if this works.

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@BlueYonder9259
That is so cool… Please can you post exactly how we can make our own .kml from our simair.io Log-Book data ?

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Agree with you @ScottS87, now that the run is over. Twice, while scud running and close to a touch and go save point… poof… CTD. Nothing worse than on final about to touch down and poof… go back to last wheels down… an hour ago. I challenged rule 7a and asked (respectfully) that CTDs allow us to spawn at nearest parallel or behind, like a golf mulligan or water ball. Only bad fuel management or flying crash should be punished for sloppy flying/planning. My final setback happened at 25hours in when my whole block outside had a power failure and my house was black… silent… and I would have to start again an hour ago. Too tired and fed up at that point and I had a ton of followers that witnessed it. With an unstable product like this, rules have to be more flexible. In a rare power failure, that should be also flexible. This wasn’t a flying incompetency.

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1167

Hi @HowardElvis, I know CTD’s are genuinely a big problem. I watched your stream too towards the end. The problem with allowing CTD’s to respawn at the nearest airport being it can be taken advantage off.
If I feel I’m having a bad approach angle / speed for a runway I can just Alt + F4 the sim and call it a CTD. It would then become your free get out of jail card…

I’m guessing that’s a logical reason the rule was put in place. I have long experienced CTD’s with the sim, and concluded the only way to reduce the chances of it, were to reboot the sim, after each 4h leg. I did that on race day, and had 0 CTD’s while I in the past have had plenty of CTD’s.

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Your windows event log would show you clearly ALT-F4’d rather than CTD’d with an error. I wonder if simair could read the windows event log?

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Honestly if a guy is doing an approach and botches it what’s the difference between a CTD and ALT-f4ing out, he still has to restart the sim. If he’s just flying along his route and CTD’s it’s obvious from the location of his plane that he just vanished. If he decides to alt-f4 and load up with fuel and wait the 10 minutes instead of landing normally that would show up by his logged locations. I don’t think the alt-f4 thing is hard to weed out.

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In the end It comes down to how capable the game SDK is. It’s often the SDK that’s queried by various logging apps like SimAir. It takes time to mature both sides of things and until the technical capabilities exists, the only way to deal with such things are by making rules.

Something humanity has gotten exceedingly good at :smiley:

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Thanks for your explanation. Keep in mind that when streamer like me with 11K followers and a few hundred watching live or afterwards, they will know if I did it right. I have encouraged the honour system throughout this event and my group flew with realistic conditions. It is not a matter of proving “not cheating”. My reputation would be at stake and so would my conscience be affected. I never expected to win or I would have changed my strategy. We (as a group) decided on flight planning properly, avoiding ice at all costs (realistic flying) and planning fuel stops and touch and goes. We even took @DrNoThumb7944 advice and restarted our sim at every 10 minute fuel stop. I still hold to my suggestion that we should not be penalized for something beyond our control. The product is obviously not ready for something of this nature. (my power failure wasn’t the sim’s fault, of course)
Thanks for the healthy discussion everyone.

We are live streaming a Cannonball discussion on my twitch stream at 5pm eastern today. ForderLearnToFly All comments from chat welcome and some of my subscribers on my wing will be live voice.

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I will repeat what I have already said on this subject several times already: the reason you can’t just respawn at the nearest airport behind you in the unfortunate event of a CTD is because I deliberately wanted to encourage different pilots to use different race strategies. It’s part of the race by design that you can choose to divert off your path and lose time to perform a touch & go for safety or just keep plowing through and hope you don’t get a CTD. How frequently you choose to create a checkpoint is also a race decision (I personally did a t&g every 45-60 minutes). You’re correct that’s it’s beyond your control if you get a CTD, but how much progress that costs you is entirely within your control under the rules of the event.

If you could simply respawn at the closest airport and barely lose any progress, then there is no reason whatsoever to ever divert for a touch & go. That’s boring. It adds an element of excitement to the event when some pilots choose a slow & steady approach with lots of touch & go save points for safety and other pilots use the high risk/high reward strategy with few or no checkpoints between fuel stops.

It’s also for this reason that I rejected the suggestion from some people that everyone should be forced to fly the same aircraft type and use the same specific pre-defined static weather conditions. Yes, that would make the competition more even, but it also removes a huge part of the excitement of the event if there is no variety in aircraft type selection and race strategy. Part of what made this event so exciting and unpredictable is that people were using different planes and different race strategies and we had the chaos of live weather to contend with.

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I almost gave up a couple of times but the boys in the Discord kept me in the game. In the end I had to finish no matter what.
Believe me, the wife made me pay.
DDawg however has far more fortitude than I. He triumphed IMO.
Never give up, never surrender

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By Grabthar’s Hammer, by the Sons Of Warvan, you shall be avenged!

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did you roll your eyes when you said that?

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High, I sent you the log from SimAir but there is a whole leg missing! SimAir struggled :smiley: Is it possible to complete the missing leg by the internal MSFS log? Or asked differently! Does the MSFS not accurately log what you have flown? But no matter if possible or not. I have completed the race :slight_smile: and if it is only for me personally :slight_smile: Super cool but Tough

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Hi @RIKAARAmbnt.

I have your time logged on the leaderboard over in the Results Thread. Check it out here:

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1178

Thank you! Crazy race! wow

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The Shock Ultra is the best little plane in the world. It was a joy to fly. The strong headwinds, crosswinds, and shaking made it difficult to trim, and it was a constant work on the stick. Yet after 30 hours the muscle memory started to form.

I learned a lot from this amazing journey. These endurance runs are a lot of fun. Hope we can do a Canada or Australia race sometime soon.

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This is excellent, thanks. The data can be imported into Google Maps and shows much more detail.