Here’s my main concern with the MSFS thermals. I think Seb Wloch is doing a great job but it’s clear he lacks the first-hand familiarity with thermals that only comes with real gliding experience and the slightly confused answers regarding lift/thermals in the dev updates makes me anxious (but HUGE credit to Asobo for doing the Dev Updates in the first place). How thermals under decent Cu’s ‘feel’ to me is as in this picture:
i.e. the rising air ‘collects’ near the ground (and you feel a thermal ‘inflow’ breeze if you’re on the ground, but that’s very much a secondary effect compared to the soaring aspects I care about). Then the air rises in a relatively well organised column which if you can find that and circle in it, you’re gliding like a boss. A significant art in soaring is finding the core of the thermal under a Cu, and not arriving at the cloud when the thermal that was definitely there when you set off is dying a slow death when you get there. It’s worth noting that the column of rising air can weight 100,000 TONNES, so nothing is going to stop that juggernaut until it decides for itself although conditions (i.e. the temperature difference between the ground and aloft) may mean the air rises slowly or quickly.
Currently the ‘thermals’ (I know Asobo say they’re not implemented yet) feel more like this picture:
i.e. the lift feels scattered and scratchy underneath the cloud, and spread in a lot of small pockets that are currently capped at the current limit of approx 5 knots / 2.5 m/s. This is less of a concern if removing the ‘cap’ means there IS a core in there somewhere at 10 knots, and the other noise stays at 5 knots (although that wouldn’t be great) but I suspect with the current implementation all the values would just scale up.
I’m not knocking Asobo - they’re doing a great job, and we’re fortunate to have this commitment to connect the lift to the clouds in a fundamental way. My example above is to highlight something basic that soaring pilots will ultimately care more about than quite a few more subtle points that have been raised over the past few months.