https://shrikesims.com/ac.php?id=pa30
Shrike Simulations (affordable and accessible offerings from Milviz/Blackbird) released its PA-30 yesterday. I haven’t had a chance to fly it yet but initial impressions seem interesting and reasonably-priced.
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Hmm, not a fan of further muddying the waters in terms of Milviz/Blackbird branding. I’m also seriously thinking: why even bother?
This might be ‘budget’ as compared to Milviz’s previous pricetags, but with that pricetag it’s competing with a metric ton of other aircraft, some of which will no doubt be better. This looks merely ‘OK’. We really don’t need more affordable so-so aircraft for the arcade flying crowd. If anything, we need more high-quality, more involved aircraft. There’s way too much tripe out there already to bother competing on price.
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Agreed. My wallet is pretty much officially closed at this point unless it’s super interesting and complete aircraft that adds something new to my collection. Something I’ll fly more than once or twice. Just picked up the Spartan, and, not really that impressed. I was already getting gunshy, but this one has really soured me on purchasing so-so aircraft. I have enough planes I enjoy flying at this point that I can be picky, and want to be picky, about what else I bring into my hangar. I don’t need any more hangar queens cluttering things up.
I will admit, however, this one is pretty on the outside. Cockpit, though, which of course is where I spend most of my time, looks off to me; I’m not sure how to explain it. Like, too plain or something. Not that the textures look FSXish, just… plain.
Anyway, good luck to them on this line. I’ll bet there’ll be others who enjoy it.
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I agree that having the same company split into Shrike, Blackbird, and Milviz is confusing and muddies the waters.
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The problem with the cockpit is that everything is pretty much beige: beige walls, beige headliner, beige sun visors, beige seats, beige grab handles, beige carpeting from what I can tell…
The cockpit seems to be lacking in any sort of color or personality. It looks too sterile, not like it was actually used. I personally much prefer something that looks like a real world aircraft of said vintage. This one just looks… meh.
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im liking it alot…very primitively and analogue, A heavy stubborn inertia feeling which is good NO AP but a basic course hold and it seems to hold altitude really well no fluctuations or squrielliness , especially on the elevator axis make sure you add a good amount of trim up and you wont have the stubborn takerolls or climbouts like in the video . I dont mind the basic looking cockpit textures.im certain we’ll see cockpit texture mods for this on fs.to, im hoping for a dirty grimey panel or wood.for $18 im pleasently satifisied with this one, on par if not better than carenado
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I doubt that’s the view a company looking for profit will take. Also what you call the “arcade flying crowd” is probably the largest (if maybe not the most active) group in MSFS. You just have to see how popular all of those 15,-EUR Microsoft Famous Flyers and Local Legends seem to be.
Also if simple and nice looking stuff weren’t hugely profitable then guys like Deimos or MScenery would have been gone 2 years ago. Simple stuff takes far less time to develop than the highly complex PMDG, JustFlight or SWS aircraft, and probably sell up to 10 times as many copies.
And while I personally am also not in the designated target group for the Shrike Sim brand, I am quite sure I will be buying one sometime, if it’s a plane I have some kind of connection to.
I don’t see a negative side to this as long as the Blackbird brand doesn’t suffer.
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First impressions:
It is just as described, a basic pay ware product. I would rank it slightly under Carenado’s planes. I was willing to give this a shot because Milviz is one of my favorite developers and the PA-30 is an interesting aircraft.
One major frustration I have is with the pitch inputs. The first 25% of travel on my yoke has no effect on the pitch and then once I hit a certain point the pitch is extremely sensitive. This makes for some terrible takeoffs and landings. I am using a honeycomb bravo and have adjusted the sensitivity settings to no avail. They need to update the pitch handling, otherwise this plane isn’t much fun to fly.
Until this plane gets an update I would hold off on it. The pitch sensitivity makes it frustrating to fly.
Might be yoke specific, I’m not having such bad pitch input issues , if it’s not trimmed up atleast an inch above the neutral notch it’s a handful, regardless you gotta keep the power in or the nose will drop. Not much different than how the 310 behaves. Just a bit more exaggerated. It’s absolutely worth $18 regardless
I’ll wait for someone to come up with a flight model mod, or an official patch. Doesn’t look like it flies well enough to justify even $17.99 at this stage. I’ll be keeping my eye on it, though.
Yeah the flight model feels a little “hollow”. Kinda twitchy in turbulence, reminds me of the Aerosoft twin otter in that regard.
I flew the Twinkie again and used more trim and it definitely feels better on takeoff and landing. Still there is a point around 50% on my yoke where it gets unnaturally sensitive. It also requires a lot of roll input to get it in a bank.
Any other honeycomb users having control sensitivity problems?
Have you tried linear curves?
I haven’t purchased this plane yet - looking forward to see how it is supported by Shrike -
But I wanted to relay this : right after the first Sim Update I found aircraft behavior in flight to be odd relative to control inputs. I fly mostly GA single and twin light aircraft - and found the aircraft reactions to control inputs to be ‘springy’ on the initial movement of the stick - then ‘sluggish’ and resistant the more the control stick was deflected in any given direction.
Anyway - as soon as the sim was updated to include ‘controller input curves’ I set up all but the throttle axes with a flatter initial line and a steeper incline toward full deflection. This seemed to cure the general problems of aircraft flight control so I recommended the changes here in a thread somewhere. The POINT is that after several Sim Updates I finally remembered that I had adjusted the controller curves profile and decided to revisit my settings - I opened a new profile, having saved the old one for reference, and applied it so I could test the default controller curves.
It turns out that some of the SU’s since the early days have cured a few of the reasons for the adjustments I had made - I still had to adjust off of the default lines a bit but not as radically as I had originally. So - if you’ve made similar early adjustments to your controller input curves as I had done - it is definitely time to review them if you haven’t already
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As @GrimPhoenix9349 noted, developers have for quite some time developed their flight models using flat controller curves. So I long ago followed suit.
I think also, knowing that controllers are pretty bad simulators of their actual counterparts, I’ve compensated accordingly, both in action and perception in how I use my joystick (without a center detent, I found my CH Products yoke unusable. Thank goodness for setting my elevator trim to an unused analog axis I have. The sim is unflyable to me with button pressing elevator trim.). IOW, I expect some twitchiness as part of the experience since we can’t have forces simulated and the throw is so much smaller.
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I use an elevator wheel that is connected to a rotary encoder. Each impuls up or down is adding or subtracting to the elevator trim a value that is different for each aircraft, because each aircraft needs different input.
I of course need a button to reset elevator trim, which is very handy anyway.
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Linear setup is required.
Motion blur on prop hubs is being removed.
We’re going to look at the pitchiness but, if you look for info on this aircraft, nose drop and pitchiness is a common factor of this aircraft. Nose heavy.
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That’s what I love about having an analog pot attached as an axis, I don’t have to worry about the different button press values.
In the back of my head I know I’m eventually going to have to wrap my head around editing the wheel friction values for all my planes, though…
sigh
So much having to customize to get it the way we like. Good thing that’s part of the fun of the system. So many things to work on all the time to make it a little bit better.
I was about to release an update for my KASH airport the other day. Then I looked at it and ripped the whole thing apart again and rebuilt a lot of it… But it was worth it. Only a few hours of work left to get it releaseable again. Of course, it’s never finished.
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I just came across this video review on YouTube:
Excellent video. Just pure sound from the sim without any commentary. It helps get a feel for what this aircraft is like. I haven’t decided on buying it or not, but it looks interesting. I was watching the turn coordinator to see if there was any ball deflection with aileron input. Maybe a little? It’s hard to tell, especially since I can’t see the rudder pedals in the field of view to confirm whether the video maker was adding any rudder input. I’m curious if it requires rudder to stay coordinated or if it behaves like a lot of default planes that require very little rudder.
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Wow that looks really bad. Like someone scraped all the sugar off a Carenado. It’s a hard pass from me.
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