Took this up for a, well a float around I guess. It was quite an interesting experience.
First up when I started my flight the basket was tilted over and the balloon envelope deflated. No worries, I thought, I’ll just follow the checklist to get the burners going and inflate this bad boy. So as I was burning away it inflated a bit and then I was dragged across the ground for quite some distance until it righted itself and I started gaining some altitude. And then I was gone with the wind.
It was a bit windy so I was making some speed. The balloon kinda tilts backwards when you get a good head of wind and it looks rather strange. I’ve never been in a hot air balloon but I live in Bristol in the UK where one can see quite a lot of balloon flights (see the Bristol Balloon fiesta) and I’ve never seen one tilt like that before. Maybe it was just a bit too windy I dunno.
I was mucking around with things and I pulled that parachute chord quite a bit until my ballon deflated and started to hurtle towards the ground. Luckily I had several thousand feet of altitude because I was burning away like mad before, and with some more burning I managed to reinflate my balloon and be on my way again. That was an interesting experience.
So I floated around admiring the views, outside and internally. The balloon looks quite nice and the physics of it are interesting when inflating and deflating. It looks a bit odd right at the top when you peek around the burner so avoid doing that. The balloon basket looks really nice, some good weaving there! And the sounds are pretty good, sounds like it should do. There’s two instruments; one for altitude and speed and another for air temperature inside the balloon. One of the instruments has buttons but are inop and I wonder what they would do IRL.
The controls are simple as one might expect, it’s just two burners with a main burn and whisper burn command each. There’s a default binding to turn on both main burners at the same time but the checklist says to only use one at a time, and to alternate which one you use so I didn’t use that command. ended up binding my own controls and that was a bit fiddly, at first they were just turning on and off rapidly but I got it working after poking around the settings. Dunno if there’s a binding for the parachute chord thing, didn’t really look.
I managed to run out of gas but my burners still worked. Dunno if that’s a visual bug with the gas cannister gauges being wrong or just a bug with the balloon itself.
After almost an hour of floating around, going where the wind took me, I decided to land. Problem is the wind was blowing me off towards a big hilly forrest, so I used my godly powers to turn the wind to blow me towards some fields. I let the air cool down and with some careful use of the parachute chord I managed to touch down in a field. It was a bit bumpy and I was dragged along to the edge of the field but we came to a stop just before a power pylon.
An interesting experience I’ve never had before. Quite relaxing in a way but I doubt I’ll ‘fly’ this much as it’s a bit too passive for me. Might be cool as a kind of interactive screen saver though with some occasional blasts of hot air to keep airbourne.
Guess I should try that other balloon with the little outboard motor as well.
And that was a lot of words about floating about the sky under a big sack of hot air!
