Hello again gentlemen, Like you, I've seen thousands of disapointed threads, posts & topics about how much MSFS came up short or how terrible they did this, that or the other. But sometimes it's the opposite and we see things we never knew existed, even after simming for years, since the start of it all. Flying PMDG aircraft I always find something new, and am always surprised, but more and more lately I've been finding other hidden things in flight sim itself, ok maybe not hidden, but surely unknown to me.I have been doing a lot of flights in the US lately, and they've been VOR to VOR for the most part (finishing a spreadsheet of small flights State to state in the USA). Anyway, I made a pretty neat discovery,,, I have yet to find a single VOR station that is not in FSX. Meaning every single spot there is a VOR listed and that I am flying to and passing over, there is also the actual 3D model on the ground. I found this to be pretty cool and never knew they had done that. I've found Over 100 in a row so far and yet to see one that's not there. When I get close I go to spot plane view and catch them most of the time. A couple nights ago I thought I finally found one that wasn't there, but after I lowered my altitude, sure enough it was right where it was suppose to be. Pretty sweet, I think.There are other things that I have known about for a while that others might not and I'm sure some of you know things that I never noticed before too. There are tons of cool things here. For example, there are fireworks the 4th of July is the USA at 10PM and every 20 minutes after at Atlanta, Dallas, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, New York, Seattle (3 places), and Washington D.C. Las Vegas has them every night. Want to see? Set up a flight at 10PM in KLAS and have a look around. Hong Kong has fire works every Chinese new year (Jan 24th) from midnight and every 20 minutes after, and there's even a download in the Avsim library for you aussies out there, for Fireworks on Australia Day!Read more about fireworks here. There are tons of things in both FS9 and FSX like Strange airports and places and Spectacular places to name a couple that a lot of us are familliar with but I've never read or realised until now about the VOR's so started wondering what else have we missed?I know, I'm bored :(, but just trying to pass the time productively waiting for the NGX release and really find the VOR thing pretty darn cool so thought I'd share, haha. Anyway, would like to hear what others may have found or are just now realizing exist.

Details are always important. The Project Aces team (designers of Ace Combat series) once tried to how would man size figures would appear in the PlayStation 2 Ace Combat 5 game, so in a icy stage they put a lot of polar bears in real size. And some people indeed spot them. I think the VOR should be easy to do, but is a cool detail anyway.

The thing that caught my eye was the Mall of America at KMSP is actually there and modeled

I'm overall really impressed from FSX since years.Simply realize that in every bigger (and that means not really big) german city are the main attractions modelled.And than realize that is all over the world (more or less).The whole technique behing really impresses me, everything what have to be computed and generated every second as we don't talk about an island - we talk about the whole world.But of course the dark side are the countless bugs and the obviously bad programming at some points.Too bad, that M$ gave up developing to eleminate the biggest bugs...

If you think it's cool spotting the VOR station from above in the sim, you should take a shot when you get up to that point in your potential license training*. The sim is one thing, but the feeling isn't as strong as when you pull it off when you're really out there. That goes for everything technical with navigation - approaches especially - but tracking to a station is generally one of the first examples you have of operating in some abstracted reality. I say that to mean when you're tracking the station on a nav instrument you're primarily focused on some invisible beam, only made "visible" by the instrument. When you finally see the station (if the vis is good and you spot it before it passes beneath you), you're transferring back to reality and it's some sort of visual proof that this abstract concept actually works. No matter how trusting we are as humans, nothing works better than proving something to yourself.Next challenge for you:Track and spot an NDB - and do it before they shut all the poor things down!First, tracking the NDB can be a pain, especially when winds and lightning toy with you (google 'NDB' and 'wind'; the lightning comment is about the ADF pointing to lightning strikes when they occur, which interrupts your tracking precision).Second, they're not easy to spot from the sky:Have fun with your haystack.Kyle*Saw your other thread - good luck. PM if you have questions. I have my license, read pilot books endlessly, and am a teacher by day, so I like to think I'm a wealth of knowledge and I'm good at knowledge transfer.

A really cool thing with the VORs too is that you start to recognize them in real life on road trips. Being in a touring band, I've done a ton of freeway driving the past few years and I've seen a lot of the VOR stations that I know and use from the sim. My bandmates are sick of me pointing them out in fact haha.

A chap in the UK made it a project to visit and photograph all the UK VORs. Many would say 'he needs to get out more' but that is exactly what he's done. A web gallery of UK VOR's!!!http://www.trevord.com/navaids/Rather sadly I did it once myself, the Lambourne VOR from Piper Arrow!http://www.casey.tgis.co.uk/web/vatsim/lam.jpg

A really cool thing with the VORs too is that you start to recognize them in real life on road trips. Being in a touring band, I've done a ton of freeway driving the past few years and I've seen a lot of the VOR stations that I know and use from the sim. My bandmates are sick of me pointing them out in fact haha.

LOL I do the same thing, even talking about places I can't help but adding a comment like, "Oh yeh, I know where Stonewall TX is because there is a VOR there!" and that is when my daughter will give me the eye-roll. Ha.

A really cool thing with the VORs too is that you start to recognize them in real life on road trips. Being in a touring band, I've done a ton of freeway driving the past few years and I've seen a lot of the VOR stations that I know and use from the sim. My bandmates are sick of me pointing them out in fact haha.

Very true. I still find it cool whenever I drive by something I saw on a sectional that I hadn't seen before. As I grew up I would always pass by this weird Y-shaped antenna on the side of the road. Turns out it's a marker beacon for IAD's 1R. Recently, I drove by a set of towers buried in the trees of Falls Church, VA. As I passed it, I wondered if it was the Falls Church RCO I always saw on my sectional. Sure enough, it was.As far as the pointouts go. It got to the point that one girl I dated would try to beat me to the punch when she saw a rotating beacon flash across the sky (I'd always point and cheer "air-port!").Kyle

Rather sadly I did it once myself, the Lambourne VOR from Piper Arrow!

I don't think that's anything to be sad about! I often try to catch a glimpse of the station when flying overhead, conditions permitting. Got a great view of the Midhurst (MID) VOR a couple of weeks ago. It's quite fun to actually SEE the station that you've been flying off. As Kyle said above, it's a much better feeling in the real world than in the sim.

...talking about un-usual things in FSX, I was once awaiting clearance at heathrow,it was dark and I saw a shooting star, I thought I was going mad...I mentioned this on a particular flightsim forum at the time, and some one replied: "oh yeh you can sometimes see these"

Actually wherever you add a NAVDATA VOR (FS NAVDATA as BGL, not FMC) one get's added automatically on the ground scenery. That's pretty neat.

A really cool thing with the VORs too is that you start to recognize them in real life on road trips.

Exactly. I've seen about half of the VORs from Romania. It's really awesome to locate them and start yelling out-loud to everyone in the car about that "Sierra Tango Juliet" identifier. Noone ever knows what I'm talking about.

Hey Dan,thanks for bringing that topic up. When I read it shortly after you had posted it I actually came up with the idea of showing a few commonly used navaids altogether, but I didn't quite have the pictures ready yet. Now I see you guys have discussed quite a bit in the meantime and also linked to that amazing UK website, really cool. Well now this could be a bit redundant but now I do have collected a few pictures and posted them over in the real aviation gallery, in case anyone is interested. Maybe you like that humonguous VOR, because just as I had expected, all these UK VORs looks pretty much the same since they are placed at appropriate places (i. e. nothing around them), as opposed to one of those I posted. :blink:Cheers,

That is pretty cool Eric, another thing I never knew.I have never seen an NDB in FS, then again I've never looked. Until the post above I didn't even know what one looked like. I think that's awesome that someone took all those pix and gathered the information. It would be an interesting read and study if flying with those specific NDB's and VOR's in their route. All the recent navigation planning I've been doing lately I rarely have NDB's in my route and only use them for approach/descent or missed approach reasons at airports for the most part. It is sad though that they're being phased out and already most in the states are gone from what I've read. It would be cool to see the team over at REX to somehow modify the ADF to react like that to their lightning haha.I never seen a VOR in real life, I'll definitely keep my eye out. I don't do much cross country and seem to always be in the city. I have been wanting to go look for some and can see some on runwayfinder.com by zooming in with satelite view on. I also know there's a weather station near me but have no idea what one looks like.Maybe I'll make it a point to visit some local VOR's and take some pics.*I too have thought I've seen shooting stars in FSX from time to time and thought it was just my imagination or graphics glitch. One thing I wish they did was add the moon phases somehow to downloaded data of somekind like jeppesen weather. I'm actually very surprised no one has done it yet, if possible of course.

I think the moon phases are accurate in FSX.