I might be wrong, but from my understanding of physics: as long as take off (full?) power is applied, it should continuously accelerate in the water, even slow, until the speed is high enough to lift it from the surface. Even without flaps.
And, reaching a higher speed with flaps 20 (way more drag) than without while still not able to take-off clearly tells there is something totally broken.
Interestingly this seems to only apply for the Seastar, so there is no issue with the water model itself.
I think your understanding is right and I completely agree with you.
My own guess for that situation is, that there is a variable for drag in water and that variable somehow is borked for the Seastar.
And with zero flaps the plane is sitting completely in the water and creates a lot of drag and prevents it from gaining any more speed. With more flaps the plane would get some âliftâ or ground effect, slightly emerge from the water and therefore reaches a higher speeds untill it es enough to break free. I actually tested flaps 20 and full power for about two minutes and all I had was a 80kn speedboat, so that wasnât fast enough.
No, there will be a maximum speed that the aircraft can reach just as in air. As others have said the Seastar seems to experience too high a drag level and the engine thrust canât overcome that to get the aircraft up to the necessary speed.
It isnât an engine thrust issue as when the aircraft does break free from the water it leaps into the air and accelerates rapidly.
I tried the 40% flaps and can confirm that it is possible to take off with this setting but only just and it takes a very long time and a very long take off run to build up enough speed.
This problem has been described at least since May 2025. I cannot understand why they do not care to fix this. Hasnât the Seastar been developed by ATSimulations who are not too bad and did the Antonov?
That is an âdecadeâ old thing with MSFS: I think even back in the FS98 times you were able to activate AP functions in aircraft that werenât supposed to support them.
So since the Seastar and PC-12 share the same avionics kit you are able to âcheatâ the Autothrust in, although it shouldnât be there.
It has come to my attention that some users would like to use our Navigraph Epic2 plugin with this aircraft, but are unable to because the âPAGEâ button is not modeled/wired.
This prevents them from managing the pluginâs settings or signing in/out. It also means they cannot change any other settings in this menu related to the avionicsâ configuration.
It looks like this button would need to be wired to H:EPIC2_DU_BUTTON_PAGE to work correctly? The avionics are already prepared to handle this, and the action works fine when triggered on an aircraft with the TSC setup.
Weâd love to support the use of our plugin on this aircraft! Let me know if thereâs anything we can assist with.
