The Halo spaceship DLC

I don’t get your point either.
Let’s leave it there.

You win - if that’s important to you.

A toy air vehicle in a flight simulator!!!

I’m apoplectic with rage. I’m incandescent in my fury.

I just exploded :scream:

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If we can’t compare MSFS to what it aims to represent (real flight), shall we compare it to GTA V instead then?

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Was finally able to take the D77-TC for a spin and have some feedback.

  1. Cruise mode seems pretty good for the most part
    a) As previously mentioned, it should be able to go faster; overspeed warning occurs around M0.67 or so. It should technically have some sort of engines that can function in-game similar to the Darkstar to get to LEO (in-universe would probably have some future tech explanation, as they would have to switch to rockets when there’s no atmosphere, etc.).
    b) The power characteristics at low speed are kind of janky. It seems to ~stall or at least starts having a significant sink rate at around 130KIAS or so; trying to blast out of it by firewalling the throttles seems a bit sluggish.
    c) It could use speedbrake functionality, e.g. by having the flight control system do some combination of pitching the four nacelles up or down while redirecting and balancing thrust to the various nozzles. I was trying some steep space shuttle-like approaches sort of simulating trying to get into a hot landing zone fast, and the vehicle doesn’t like to slow down easily.

  2. The hover mode feels more “gamey” than I’d prefer; my preference is that it feel a bit more like a helicopter, but I understand that might more easily confuse inexperienced flyers. In-universe, I get that the automatic flight control system would likely do a lot of stuff for you, but it could use a bit more feedback to feel a bit less on-rails. An example of a compromise solution might be to let the aircraft pitch and roll a few degrees in the direction of stick movement. An additional one would be to give it some inertia, i.e., to move forward you pitch slightly forward, and then aircraft starts easing forward, and then you immediately let it level out and coast forward; to stop you would do the reverse by pitching back slightly to slow down to a stop.

  3. The transition between cruise and hover is pretty abrupt. Doing an approach into a field is awkward when you try to go from cruise mode to hover, partly again because you lose your inertia in an unnatural-feeling way. In my opinion, ideally I’d like to transition smoothly between the two states like how in the V-22 Osprey you use the thumb wheel on the throttle/power control lever.

  4. The landing gear has wheels, so the aircraft should roll on the runway if you do an approach and landing on a runway in cruise mode. I tried this, and weird stuff happens on touchdown (parking brake was released).

  5. One of my normal pet peeves: the PFD attitude indicator/synthetic vision mode should have the option of a flight path vector (FPV) or velocity vector. This would help with item 1b from above as far as seeing what the aircraft is doing AOA-wise at low speed, maintaining altitude more easily while hand-flying, etc.

I guess I’ll add later if I think of anything else. Overall it’s okay, and it’s free, so hard to really complain…

Has anyone done any repaints on this?

Also, I wonder if there is a paint kit?

I hope they come out with the little alien craft. The Banshee.

What is cool about opening up this simulator to other groups, not just Cessna lovers or airliners lovers, but also Halo, etc, is that others can experience it as well. This is an amazing platform. We can use this for aerospace design, we can use it for Halo and other followers to fly in. Imagine some of the cool scenery addons we could do for off world zones. (I want an X-Wing). The possibilities are massive.

One Idea that I have wanted to see is landable rockets that could be flown, based on SpaceX, so one could take a Starship to orbit, then re-enter the atmosphere, and do a hands on landing, or optional autopilot auto-land. But being able to do a landing manually, perhaps having a screen on the panel and line up the X on the landing pad with the screen and throttle down as you approach the pad, would be pretty awesome. Docking with a station in orbit, also awesome. Doing a ‘airliner’ style SpaceX country-to-country flight, also awesome…

Some awesome possibilities for multiple uses of this amazing ‘world’ platform. :slight_smile:

Bill
LHC

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People are really acting like getting spaceships in a flight sim is the end of the world. As if there weren’t any space ships to buy/download for free in FSX??? Lol I remember flying the Romulan Warbird over Edwards Air Force Base. Clearly there’s a market for this stuff, so what’s the harm in people producing products that fill the niche?

9 Likes

I definately agree.

As long as I can really choose which type of realism experience I would like to have (i.e. deleting or not installing specific content), I guess they could make any additions. In my case, I love a true to life flight sim. Cheers!

This is absolutely what I’ve been waiting for almost 2 years and I am grateful to see this “thing” coming up before some basic bugfixing.

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MSFS handles the space views really nice. I think there is a possibility it could become an aerospace sim.

Now we just need orbital mechanics.

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Have you tried KSP? You can do all those things along with design/engineering. Docking in space by hand is really hard. Some of the burn manuvers are counter intuitive.

It might require a MSFS spinoff for Microsoft Space Simulator. KSP was hugely successful despite it’s complexity.

There’s a Lego X-Wing available…

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You cant use orbital mechanics without the ability to travel into space, and right now 275000 feet is the limit. Best you can do is fly into the stratosphere…

The spinoff is FSX Spaceport, though it seems a dead project now, and wont support MSFS because of the 275k limit.

KSP2 has been severley delayed as well. But ksp 1 is still good. Except them green guy running around everywhere ;p

Why is there a hard altitude limit?

What is its function?

Can it be got round by editing an .xml file somewhere?

These are the burning questions for us who want to reach orbit.

It where the world end sorry, they didnt make the sim world any higher then 275,000 feet. Nothing you can do about it other then goto the wishlist thread and either search or make a new thread asking for it to be changed.

Darkstar wants to climb above that, but it cant because thats the end of the world. You see the solar system is just painted on a glass ball that encircles the earth and cannont be breached.

Personally … I blame the aliens for trapping us here on this god forsaken ball of rock ;p

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I feel trapped in a glass ball now.

Relax mate.

It’s turtles all the way down . . .

Turtles_all_the_way_down

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They make it easier since they can live for hundreds of years without food, water or a need for safety. :laughing:

Seeing updates introduced for the stratosphere support makes me want to make orbit.

The mods are being awfully lenient on this thread!

Proper orbital mechanics and being able to fly in LEO would be cool, on the other hand there isn’t much to do but watch if rockets get introduced as its simply not possible to hand fly a rocket into space or guide a spaceplane / capsule manually back through the atmosphere, so I’m not sure how useful this would be.