I wonder....

[boing71234567 0]

I am curious to know if someone is able to acuretly simulate "extreme weather" in fsx? For Example flying into Oklahoma during the tornado season and seeing a tornado on the ground moving with the storm witht he REX 2.0 storm clouds. Or going down to Florida and being confronted with a beast hurricane and take your captain sim C130 and go inside the hurricane and in the eye wall, eye, etc. Is this fact or fiction? Whats your opinion? feel free to add your opinion on this.-thank youMatthew Miller

[Guest jshyluk]

I appreciate your curiosity! Anything is possible, but realistically I would say no. A) FSX is primarily intended to simulate most real-world operations. Flying into a tornado is pretty far away from what airplanes would do. You don't see aerial footage of people chasing twisters because aircraft stay well away from them. Even if you did want to get close, there's all of that debris to consider. Granted, people do fly into hurricanes with specially-developed aircraft, which leads to...B) FSX on its own can't make gigantic clouds. The best it can do is take a bunch of smaller clouds and stack them up to vaguely approximate a thunderhead. I have a picture of that in one of my Reviews, but you can do the same in FSX by setting up thunderstorm weather and looking aloft using slew. Maybe some weather add-on I have yet to see can make a single massive cloud like a thunderhead... but a fast-moving animated giant cloud like a tornado would be really difficult, both in terms of design and system resources. C) FSX doesn't shine handling turbulence, either. Just crossing one weather cell can create strange wind shears aloft, so that many folks just switch off the "wind stress causes damage" function. Even if FSX could string together the weather cells to simulate a tornado or a hurricane, you'd get dumped out of your flight in a stress crash long before you'd see the eye of the storm. So if you turn off damage, then you could get close, which leads us back to A), the vast majority of pilots don't do this and live. But saying that you have an invulnverable aircraft, FSX doesn't handle the tricky winds well. You won't get your ride caught in some kind of Wizard Of Oz death spiral as you get sucked into the twister because FSX can't (yet) generate that type of force in a thermal updraft. I am certain there are developers out there that have the box art all planned out with the bird's eye view of the Cessna banking into a dark, twisting tornado ripping apart some hapless farm in the green fields of the American midwest. But putting that dream together would be a lot of work for a payoff with debatable selling potential. If someone does succeed in making this work, though, I would love to Review the product!Jeff ShylukSenior Staff ReviewerAVSIM

[JSkorna 137]

Hi,Both Active Sky X and Active Sky Advanced can simulate real time hurricanes and their conditions.

[JohnE 0]

Hi,Both Active Sky X and Active Sky Advanced can simulate real time hurricanes and their conditions.

I can attest to this :(

[Guest PPSFA]

I can attest to this :(

So can I, you ain't landed in FSX until you have with a 90 knot crosswind!!! :(

[JSkorna 137]

:( :( pilots!