Sense of speed when flying through clouds

Even as a heavy flier this never really bothered me. Coming into and out of cloud layers the clouds behave just as I think they should and can remember. Maybe your perception of how fast they should be moving is skewed. The only time I see clouds zipping by IRL is if there’s low level winds around 40-50MPH. That only seems to happen from about 1,000-3,000 feet anyways. Anything higher does seem to go slower but that’s because you’ve increased the range in which you’re looking at the total picture. Kind of like when you zoom into 0.5nm on your ND display vs. 640NM where waypoints don’t seem to be moving. You’ve increased the depth of range.

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I am not sure you can judge a PA28 (100mph) to a commerical jet 400-500mph for this copmparison.

One thing that may impact on this is the lack of cloud structure in the sim. There is no real wispiness to them, and they also do not occlude the wings when you pass through them, so its like you are flying inside an opaque lightbulb.

The cloud is on the outside of your planes “bubble”, and does not interact with it.

https://youtu.be/OiRt1WbrRc8?t=95

Timestamp around 1:38 would do nicely.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that approaches this. But I have seen those larger changes in cloud formation far past the wing tips.

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I mentioned both in my post. :wink:

Here’s another good example, starting at 5:28:

Trying slowing this down to 0.5x speed and it still doesn’t look similar to what you’d see in the sim/ The problem isnt so much it feeling “slow”, but more about how the cloud structures in MSFS are very low poly.

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yeah the visual sense of speedis definitely not here in MSFS

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Actually it’s not extremely bad, i just paid attention to it and recorded a small take off.

It’s still processing on YT but you can tell it’s not that bad.
It can be a tad bit better tho.

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https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/live-weather-clouds-density-opacity-always-zero/544158/79?u=comfyclover4141
Here is what is potentially possible in the sim if they make improvements to it and render it well using live weather. Of my many hours spent in the sim over the past 3 years, less than 1% of my experiences have had me fly through clouds as dense as these examples. Check my description on that post.

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