Ahoy sailors,
after buying and testing the Carenado Seneca I found out that I like the Seneca even more than the Ovation. The cockpit is absolute cozy and comfortable, the seats are very soft and ergonomic, everything is tinted in a warm brown tone.
The cockpit illumination is perfect at night, and the instruments are absolute gorgeous (but for me everything that is not standard Garmin glasscockpit is “gorgeous”.) But that´s not the full story, I love that the Seneca has a outside and cabin temperature gauge, plus a functioning TIT gauge (the Carenado Mooney M20 has no functional TIT gauge, the TIT temperature setting is just an empty bar on the right side of the cockpit on this EDM gauge.)
Well in the Seneca the TIT reading is functional.
There are two ampere gauges - an absolute FANTASTIC cockpit, worth every penny.
Now the old problem… the weather radar.
Both weather radars (the implemented Bendix weather radar and the Garmin 750 add-on GPS) are functional in a strange theoretical way - which means they show me a horizontal and vertical radar scan of the cloud formations, but keep the scanned image as a static image without doing further scans while flying forward into new cloud formations.
Also changing the scanning range of the radar does not function.
Only switching between vertical and horizontal scans give me new (but again fully static) radar scans. I assume it´s that old weather radar SDK problem again.
Here are some screenshots, everyone should have this awesome looking machine in the hangar
(and please FINALLY ADD THE WEATHER RADAR in the SDK, every single add-on developer is waiting for that!)
Look at this magnificent shaped engine nacelle design with the engine mounted above the wing instead of just having it hanging under the wing in some ugly way:
The weather radar only show a static picture on both the Garmin 750 and the Bendix radar:
The winner for the best shaped engine nacelle design… is the Piper Seneca! This engine nacelle looks like some Gepard or Jaguar while jumping forward. Imagine how strong these turbo-charged six-cylinders are currently pulling on the plane.
May the force of the crankshaft be with you!
When looking at the carpet it is clear that many of the cockpit interior textures are not just mirrored in the middle, but great textures with endless possibilities for repainting and/or giving the interior a uniqué touch:
Normally I don´t care about cabins (especially not boring airliner cabins - repetative rows of hundreds of copy-paste seats are an absolute waste of polygons and rendering/calculating power and VRAM), but cabins of smaller jets, business jets, business planes or private GA planes that look that awesome are truly precious and invite to take a seat while the autopilot is doing the flying…
I love this eighties Knight Rider style gauge showing me electric details, Amps, voltage, battery charging details. The other setting has manifold pressure RPM and turbine interstage temp (which is in this case related to the turbo charger, but I need to read more detailed technical info about this plane´s engines). There is a little bug, the reading for the outside temp says “OUTS IDE” - I am going to send a bugfix ticket to Carenado to make them consider patching this little spelling error to make that plane perfect
Detailed from every angle - that´s how a perfect cockpit/cabin looks like.
I love this prop-deicer amp gauge!
I would rate this plane with 5 out of 5 stars - but ONLY if the weather radar problem is getting solved and a fully functioning weather radar that is updating it´s scans while flying and with working scan radius change, is patched