Been looking for something interesting to fly long range with a military twist. I keep waiting on the SR-71A from Blackbird Simulations…seeing that this has arrived if it’s like, passable and flies well I might have my weekend mission ha. Will wait to see what others think before throwing down the cash. For “industry veterans” they sure aren’t talking about their other projects. No link to a manual and loads of questions.
I bought the extra livery pack just before they made it free. They immediately refunded me. I’m impressed!
Sorry but can’t resist posting a couple of images.
It’s just an animation tied to the plane itself, no actual bombs dropping, and they vanish a few seconds after the last ones have dropped but it’s still kinda neat in a goofy way. Flying from Whiteman down to Tinker so I’ve just bombed some poor Kansan farmer’s fields
I forsee a lot of these around Vegas this weekend LOL. Ok…so how does it fly?!
I wanna see you drop some bombs upwards if you fly inverted, then “release” them.
Hah, it might work but you gotta be flying straight and level for it to start. I wonder if it’ll continue running the bomb dropping animation if you fly inverted after starting it though. I’ll give it a try tomorrow if I remember.
As to how this bird flies: I ain’t too sure how a big smooth flying wing should fly but this simulated one seems to fly pretty reasonably to me. Bit sluggish at low speeds but otherwise seems to handle pretty well. It’s FBW though so it’s generally a case of point it where you want to go and it’ll stick to it.
Did a couple touch and goes at Tinker and had no problems landing it. I think I remember reading that IRL this plane is a bit of a floater when it came to landings and they have to fly a steeper approach to get it to come down but didn’t really feel that on this version.
Anyway, it looks pretty good and sounds decent enough. All the weird flaps and whatnot this tailless wonder has are nicely animated, including the split outer flap thing for ‘rudder’ control and speed brakes.
The cockpit’s alright. Seems to look similar to the real modernised ones from google photo pics, but it’s not the most exciting place. Get a good view of the left engine nacelle if you lean over though.
The PFD isn’t that great. The speed and alt are inside tiny circles that are hard for me to make out and there’s no real vertical speed indicator, just a dot spinning around the altitude circle. There are two bigger gauges for airspeed and altitude to the lower right but no vert speed there either. Bit annoying.
There’s a few MFDs to mess about with but not too much. There’s a basic map that shows your flight plan route and airports and airspaces but no zoom scale indication when you zoom in and out, that’d be nice to have. The nav mode screen does its job for heading and course settings and for changing nav source and activating ILS etc. You get fuel and engine status and a couple other things, a downwards pointing camera (would be nice if you could zoom that like in the Darkstar) and a foward looking synth vision thing. There’s a simulated “radar” which I think just shows traffic data. Oh and a STATS thing showing alerts and gear status and some other things. Nothing too detailed. Oh also an engine display in the middle as well.
There’s a really basic FMS thing that I didn’t really do much with apart from to change nav radios and to check the automatic performance page for take off speeds. There’s a basic autopilot that has heading hold, nav mode, altitude hold and approach mode. Tried them all out and they seemed to work okay apart from approach mode, didn’t try that as I just hand flew the landings fine.
So I think it’s alright and fair play to Ini/KwikFlight in making the livery pack free. Ain’t the greatest plane out there and definitely not “”“study level”“” but I’m enjoying it.
Oh and here’s a double rainbow for this sneaky death dealer
Okay, given my snarky comments about the paint jobs (due to stealth, you’re never going to see a B-2 in a “Tiger Meet”-style paint), I have to admit that even those paints are amazingly detailed. And the realistic ones are nailed down to the panel identifiers.
Did a little flying around while eating lunch, and I gotta say, this plane is freaking awesome for the price. There are a lot of inop systems in the cockpit and stuff, but everything you need for a 6,000-mile IFR flight is there, some cool visual touches, flight model feels good, and the modeling is superb.
I wonder who these guys are, because they definitely know their stuff.
There’s a little refuelling switch down by the fuel panel. Not pressed it but I imagine it might top up your fuel, I think I’ve seen that on at least one other mil jet. So you could always try a flight from Whiteman to Afghanistan and back with a few ‘refuels’. It’ll only take about 30 hours
Sounds pretty decent, thanks for the reviews guys!
@Megadyptes7635 no chance of landing this one in a football stadium I guess?
On the page it says air-to-air refuelling port animation. For a moment I thought it meant actually it spawned a refuelling tanker you could connect with. Now THAT would be something.
I really don’t get all those weird boy racer liveries either. Would rather save a few of the 5gb disk space and not have any of those at all! Yuk
I bit and picked it up. The first thing I’ve found that just isn’t right is the pop out gauges. They don’t work correctly and can not be used in the current form, which sucks if you are like me and have external monitors for gauges.
A LOT and I mean most of the switches and buttons are inop, including de-ice switches, ground power selections, all the comm volume knobs, and most of the electric controls with the exceptions of the gern and apu start switching (though they don’t light up like they appear they would).
Most of the dimmers appear to work, all the lights seem to work. Bleed air switches toggle, I assume it’s not actually simulated. (The apu sound and bleed air sounds are on regardless of plane condition. Oddly enough in the external view once the APU’s are “started” the sounds stop, ugh lol)
The manual also tells you there is no way to load a flight plan other than from the simulators map planner. Which is not good - even for an 18 dollar plane. What I did find is that if you have the GTN750, like other planes, you can build and load the plan from there and it does show up in the FPLN page of the FMS. So it works - but come on let us enter it at least from the FMS all the buttons are there!!!
Looking everything over now - so once I get the flightplan loaded and take off I’ll give more feedback on it it actually follows the plane loaded like that. So far it’s what I expect from an $18 plane - but I wish they would have put just a touch more effort into it. It would have taken this from a “eh ok so far” plane to a “must buy”. So far this is really for those must have a B-2 types or someone who just really wants something different.
Find me a 1-2 mile long stadium with a very low stand and then we’ll be in business
Forgot to mention all those INOP switches. It would be nice to have more of them working, even if they didn’t do anything. I just like flipping switches. Wonder how icing is implemented on this plane. FMS is very basic. Doesn’t bother me too much but I understand why it’ll bother others. And I had that APU sound bug as well, also had a weird sudden abrupt cut out sound from within the cockpit when turning the engines on.
Inside the FMS PRFM page it auto calculates speed and weights. There’s nothing you can change here - it also will not give you a range on the fuel load. Knowing nothing about flying a Real B-2 I loaded 50% fuel 50% payload for a total of 302.1 lbs GW (231.9 ZFW) and it calculated speed of V1-151, VR-171, V2-176 which seems reasonable? For the weights it seems to be inline with a large tuber.
Flight plan did load with procedures without any fuss from the GTN750 - so I mark that a win, especialyl since the map displays inside the plane do not zoom out very far, and there’s no FPLN checking like you could be used to from a commercial plane.
Engine start is a push button affair - no fuel switches or anything. Just a press of the button (4 total) and it comes alive. Sounds seem appropriate and it doesn’t sound like they took stock sounds from anything.
I did find that it has auto ground spoilers - inside this plane they are called “auto brk” so that’s a nice touch! Entry hatch has sounds inside the cockpit which is nice too. During start up figured out that this plane (like most cheaper planes) really don’t care about the power situation. With gens off, battery on, and no ground power everything stays running without any errors or master caution and warnings.
Taxi light will not come on until parking brake is off - nice touch. After start up the sound is really nice - the apu door closing looks smooth and the secondary engine vents opening looks decent enough. One thing I didn’t think about that I’m just now looking for is auto throttle. Not a thing on this plane - though it’s maybe not an issue anyways - we aren’t flying for passenger comfort.
Looking at the animations of the control surfaces they did a fantastic job on the elevons? Not sure what you would call them - but they animate smooth and appear the way you would think they should. No flaps in this bird - as I would assume in the real work the flight dynamics are tightly computer controlled or this thing would probably fall from the sky ha!
Ok time to take off and taxi - more notes coming.
You might want to do that the other way around
Found this earlier:
The leading edge of the wing had an internal structure that helped it absorb radar energy. The outermost wing segment featured a “rudderon” or “deceleron” – a vertically-split airbrake / rudder that simultaneously opened up and down. To act as an airbrake, both the decelerons were opened, while to act as a rudder, only one was. This clever gimmick went back to the original Northrop flying wings. There was an “elevon” (elevator-aileron) inboard of the deceleron on the outermost segment of each wing, and then two elevons further inboard, on the next segment. Finally, there was a single control surface for pitch control on the “beavertail” at the center end of the aircraft, giving a total of nine control surfaces.
And yeah they are nicely animated, had fun watching them do their thing, especially that split one. Which reminds me, forgot to check something. The manual says that when stealth mode is on control deflection animations are limited, wonder if it stops the ‘rudderon’ from splitting:
The decelerons had to be opened about five degrees before they were effective, and in normal cruising flight they were left slightly open. However, this undermined stealth, so when the bomber was in hostile airspace, it used differential engine thrust for yaw control.
Oh just remembered another thing I think is a bug: the landing gear sound seems a bit delayed. You don’t hear anything until it’s almost finished its extending/retracting animation.
Doh yeah LOL…
So the thing feels like it has weight when it taxi’s, needs a fair amount of “umph” to get it moving at 50% fuel and 50% payload, nice - feels like most planes in MSFS when turning on the ground, touchy. Take off perf calcs were pretty spot on - nose was able to rotate and left the ground nicely around 176 knots.
My immediate feeling once airborne. “Fly by wire” - they did a nice job making it feel like there’s a computer calculating what you’re wanting to do - its hard to explain but you can feel some decision making going on to keep the plane stable. It’s not jerky feeling though.
Climb out - pulling back the engines to 91 on the N2, at a 2500FPM climb cleaned up it’s keeping roughly 360 knots (This thing could be a rocket from appearance - probably would handle more like 4000 FPM at 50% if you’re in a hurry and maintain 225-250 knots) - only going to FL300 since I’m doing the Whiteman to TInker flight which sounded appropriate for a first flight in this!
Just like with the flightplan - I have external controls for the AP - they works with standard binds for AP on/off, altitude and V/S select etc. That seems to be working just fine, so that’s very good. Light controls are also standard setup controls so no special binding there.
Of course with this being a B2 you gotta turn on stealth mode- not much to say there but she’s as pretty in the sim as real life cleaned up and flying. Speaking of cleaning up - on takeoff when pulling the gear up the secondary engine intakes close as well - animation are well done there too!
Finding the flight path the plane was smooth, doesn’t over correct, and doesn’t sway side to side…looking well…whats this? HA - the flight display just added a new message “Ready for release”…humm, not going to say if someone caught those - state secrets and all. Not that I would know but the bomb drop animation falls far enough below to look cool - does not change the weight of the plane once dropped which is a bummer. I swear I didn’t drop my weapons… Final notes comes soon - I’m roughly 25% into the flight and cruising happily at 345 knots, 90% N1.
At thes power settings and fuel level the GTN750 is calculating a range of 1750nm, which is well short of real life - which would be around 3000 miles with half loads. Granted they probably pull the power further back than I’m flying. Ground speed of 515 kts currently with ~9800Gal of fuel Endurance is slated at 3 hours 18 minutes. So if you want a mil jet to long haul - here it is.
Yeah, there’s a bunch of INOP switches and stuff, but I mean, honestly, when I saw the price and the paint jobs, I was expecting MScenery or at best Deimos quality. And it’s way better than that.
This was the opposite of my reaction when I first loaded the Captain Sim 777. This one greatly exceeded my expectations.
Elephant in the room… just seen Top Mach Studios posting a teaser for THEIR B-2 Spirit today. Eck…
Again, not that I would know - but that bomb drop animation is so cool to watch. Time for descent into KTIK, estimated time of arrival was roughly 11 minutes at 108 miles, whoops played around too much - adjusted the alt on the AP and the plane went automatic into a 2000FPM descent. Looks good…still too fast - when you pull the throttle off this thing slows down pretty quickly. Need to figure out the right timing for this bird, but it looks to be consistent.
Approaching for an ILS - setting the frequence and course was super easy, for what they did build into the FMS I like it. Works well. Stealth mode needs to come off - no ATC like a plane just mysteriously showing up on approach, figured I’d give them notice as I passed through FL200.
So far through the whole flight this thing has been massively well manner - no really big stinging issues that are poking at me really. This continued all the way into the ILS approach which it followed no fuss no muss. I let it continue to 1500 ft then hand flew the touch down…which I must say among all the FA-18 goons at Tinker I was the coolest kid on the block with a finely placed 225FPM touch down in my slick flying wing.
So, conclusion. Is this a must buy? For military av geeks, people who like something different, those of you who know how to work around little niggles, like using the GTN750 makes this thing at least 50% better. Then yes must buy, it performs and looks in all the right places.
For those of you who are looking for something super high fiedelity, as you should know an $18 still top secret plane ain’t going to get you there. But for those of you who want something neat to live out your secret squrrel dream and military long haul, stand-off, force multipling, flying wing dreams. This is the best of the best that we currently have. Easily a SOLID 7/10 for MSFS and an 8/10 in the price range!
I can confidently say - I assume it will be better? Maybe? Than this and if it is I’ll have a second one in a heart beat. This thing is fun - give me more switches to flip and things to look at and do and I’m not even thinking about another purchase.
I saw their video right before I bought this one - they announced they were working on it quite awhile ago. But like most things, for $18 I can play right now there might be here by end of the year or it could be a lot longer. For $18 I’ll turn and burn this one all over the sky and see what that one offers once its here!