Rl glider pilot here I did ridge soaring in RL and I can tell you this lesson is broken on many levels - no clear criteria, you start so high and so close to airfield you shouldn’t be forced to fly at that high speed and it is not clear you should use airbrakes to descend and fly low or keep high with weaker lift, those blue lines are thermal visualizations, not airflow visualizations! The irony is in debug mode in debug weather window there is proper airflow visualization toggle that would work better here as it shows how particle from given startpoint would travel including terrain geometry. For good ridge lesson they should have set weather without thermals (like stratus in autumn) - as I was able to skip the ridge, climb in thermal areas over flatlands located upwind and got higher ridge lift score than I tried do it realistically flying near ridge - ridiculous!
I did’t file it as a bug yet as I think there are way more important, glider related bugs - namely thermal model lacking basic/fundamental properties of RL thermals - there is a wishlist item for better thermal realim.
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