After take off and settling into the part of the flight were you have autopilot on and two or three hours of doing nothing but looking out of the window I found that by holding down the R key and the Ctrl key and then using the plus key I can just speed up the flight and get to the next interesting bit [the decent and landing] much faster.
[This is were a sim beats the real thing] 
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Don’t forget to take it back to normal speed before approach, or that landing is going to be super fast! 
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On flightsim.to there are a couple of utilities that are helpful in managing the sim rate:
SimRate Bandit: External utility that displays a small window. When you engage it, it automatically increases the sim rate, decreases the rate as you get close to a waypoint (to avoid overshooting the turn), then increases the rate after you pass the waypoint.
It is super simple and works very well.
Sim Rate Selector: In-game addon that appears as a icon in the tool bar at the top of the screen. This does not automatically adjust for waypoints, but it does work well and it is displayed in the simulator screen, not as a separate window.
Both of these utilities are also handy when you are manually controlling the sim rate because they display the current sim rate. Sometimes I forget how many times I pressed R to increase the rate and at higher altitudes it can be difficult to visually determine if I’m going faster than 1x.
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That’s why I plan flights without a boring cruise. Either a short IFR hop, but most of the time flying VFR 
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Same. I don’t fly airliners, so no long haul for me. But my GA flights rarely exceed 1 hour of flight time, so under 90 mins total from cold and dark to shutdown. Leaves me little time to get bored during cruise.
And I also operate my own radios, keep checking weather, keep an eye on the outside for traffic, etc, so that keeps me busy for the brief time I’m in cruise.
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yes, but the food is lousy on the short hops…
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Yeah discovering and using the sim rate feature is a godsend. Its something that should have been more widely understood and promoted from early on as it can transform your enjoyment of the sim. A lot of people don’t seem to know about it what it does. Its a bit of a hidden feature.
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That´s me!
Accelerating the simulation rate in a 13.5 hour transoceanic flight is against my religion.
Honestly, pleople, with all those dynamic numbers in the cockpit you can always keep an eye on how they change, until one becomes a prime number.
If you don´t find that amusing, then there is something wrong with you!
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2 buttons on my flight stick.
One to increase the Sim Rate.
One to decrease the Sim Rate.
Use them all the time.
well hold on. I don’t use sim rate either but i won’t judge someone for using it. Some people have families or jobs that limit their time to play. Sometimes those folks want to do more than they’re normally able due to these time restrictions and the option to hurry the flight up so you can get your other priorities taken cared of should be available to those who might need it.
Don’t get me wrong, i’m picky about my immersion as much as the next simmer but there’s no wrong way to play…
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This!
You use the sim as you want. No one gets to tell you otherwise. You paid your admission, you enjoy it the way you want. It’s that simple.
The only thing that irks me is the AFK pilots that brag about and insist their 5000+ hours of logged flight time being somehow meaningful when 4800 hours of that was flown by the AI copilot while they were sleeping or at work / school.
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Might as well just do a shorter flight 
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Someone once asked me what i get out of flying a virtual plane for hours on end.
I replied: The satisfaction of knowing i didn’t kill 160 virtual people…
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Come on!
13.5 hours looking for prime numbers in the cockpit displays? That´s so sick I thought it made it perfectly obvious I was just kidding and nobody would think I was serious…
Of course, I coudn´t agree more with what you say…
No wrong way to use the sim!
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Yeah you don’t want to go bed thinking you lost 100s of virtual people crash landing
Exactly….I know quite a few long haul airline pilots whom are mates, and have clocked up 10’s of thousands in their logbooks. As one of them said, about 40% of these, he was in the land of snooze:sleeping:
It’s a bit ridiculous that it’s 2023 and they still haven’t put a sim rate indicator into the sim natively. Serious low-hanging fruit right there.
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So true, lol!!! I don’t remember ever boasting about my hours because that!!!
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The longer the flight the more rewarding a successful landing is to the brain.
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