What’s your personal best? I have one of those low times, I intend to make a video after SU8 release explaining everything you need to know to be fast. Happy to help you gain some time. PB is done on unmodified game version, standard time trial, no wind change, or anything of any sort.
My personal best, flying what I would expect is “standard” flying (but I have never actually flown any aircraft), is 7:50.983 which at the time was enough for number 10, should still be top 20 probably. Video of it can be found here for verification, no tricks in it, just RPM change and clean flying:
For the lower time I currently have on the leaderboard (7:49.224), it uses a weird flying technique where you basically pull as hard as possible in short spikes. This was discovered recently on discord. It works only in unlimited.
I know the 39 time uses a similar technique but with pitch trim involved as well. No idea how first place got their time (the 27). Basically it seems high Gs is not punished too badly as long as it’s short. Maintaining 4G to do a “smooth” turn is way more punishing in speed than doing a bunch of 9Gs.
Is it fair? That’s a real tough question if you ask me. I would assume this isn’t possible in the real aircraft (you’d break parts of the aircraft? pilot trouble from too much Gs?). So if you look at it from the point of view, you’d probably say that’s not fair. But then who’s to decide exactly when a flying technique/line passes the limit of fairness? And there are other unrealistic things in game, like full throttle the whole time. This would be engine breaking in real life as far as I’m aware.
The problem is the game allows it. Anyone can do it, it’s nothing fancy, the game is not modified at all, it’s only about how you move the stick.
An option would be for the community of racer to agree on what’s fair. That happens in some gaming communities, but:
- There is no such uniform, organized community at this time.
- It would be hard to really verify any of it considering how complex the in game physics are.
I think the only real solution is for the game to remove any of these unwanted behaviors. Punish it with drag, whatever. Otherwise, as long as you’ve flown the course yourself, what the game allows is what’s fair. Making it easier to find how times are set would be nice, and reset the leaderboards once unwanted flying is fixed will be a must. Anything allowed by an unmodified game is fair otherwise.
At least until the game is stable we should just assume the leaderboards contain undiscovered, or little know flying tricks that help gain time. Again so far techniques have been publicly discussed.
We do intend to report this drag oddity in unlimited as a bug, allow MSFS to fix the issue if it is one. What do I know, I’m no pilot, maybe this is realistic?