As you know, failures in FS2004 can be set for a given time (or randomly) for 6 instruments, 3 systems, 3 radio functions, and the engines. In the course of my planned double circumnavigation of the globe in my MAAM-SIM DC-3, I want things to go wrong from time to time for the sake of realism as well as to test my skill at dealing with adversity. To achieve this goal, however, more than one potential failure must be in the mix, and the probability of such events needs to be both random and infrequent.I've discovered a trick for reducing probability, but it's not quite enough so I'm looking for ideas (hence this post). The trick is this:On a planned flight of one hour, set the beginning time for a random failure at 0 minutes and the maximum at 600 minutes (which is the most permitted as far as I can tell). Now the failure will occur sometime during a 600 minute period, but you're only going to be flying for 60 minutes, so the probability that it will occur during your flight is 1/10 or 10%. Unfortunately, doing the same thing for a 2-hour flight would result in a 20% probability. And if I have, say, 8 possible failures, each with a 20% probability, too many things are going to go wrong for the sake of realism (or my abilities :-)). The problem is that these probabilities are too large if I want to have several different things set up for potential failure during a 2 to 3 hour flight. The idea is to know neither WHEN the event will occur, nor WHAT event will occur. This requires having several different failures (instrument, system, radio, engine, etc.) possible so that when I see gauges doing funny things, or start hearing funny noises, I have to figure out what has gone wrong before I begin to address the problem. If the maximum were 6000 or 10,000 minutes, it'd be easy. Maybe there's a way to tweak the code to achieve this?Any ideas will be welcomed.Thanks,Gary

A while ago, I downloaded a payware program called FS Reliability Factor. It works really well, and allows you to set up failures much more realistically. You can set an overall failure probability, or down to every individual components. IIRC the percentages go to three decimap points, so you can set things up much more realistically (ie failures are very very rare). Or of course you can bump them up to give you a challenge. You can find the demo in the library: fsrf17.zipI don't remember the exact cost, but it was very inexpensive.

Craig,Thanks for the info. Looks very interesting.For anyone with the knowledge, though, I'm still in the market for a way to tweak FS2004 so that the 600 minute maximum setting for failures can be increased substantially, say to 6000 or even 10,000.Best regards,Gary