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jcomm

Ice build up in XP11

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Motivated by a discussion in a thread at the .Org I decided to search for the subject and found this old thread.

I know I participated in quite a few even before 2012 / 2014, at the .Org and other sites, and discussed it with Austin, as suggested by my last post on that thread...

It's been a long time since I devoted time to test it but I believe I've seen user complaints about it still being a bit overdone. Wonder if any of you have came across this "fast ice build up" on heavier aircraft ?

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/62818-ice-buildup-and-such/

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Ryzen 5600x, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, 1 TB & 500 GB M.2 nvme drives, Win11.

Glider pilot since October 1980...

Avid simmer since 1992...

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What parameters should theoretically determine the rate of ice accumulation?

My intuition suggests a formula like this: Accretion_Rate = Icing_Potential * Aircraft_Frontal_Area * True_Airspeed,

where "Icing_Potential" is a variable depending on the density of supercooled water in atmosphere, which is in turn determined by humidity and temperature (I've seen tech docs on this subject weeks ago on avsim).

Of course, one should also introduce a further term to account for the effect of anti-ice devices.

I don't know if XP uses such a formula. But this is one of the aspects in which I would prefer a more open/empirical approach, instead of the closed one used by XP. In other words, the possibility of customizing the modeling of ice build-up on a per aircraft basis (I think something like that could be made for example using the Flight Gear approach for the flight model).

Although, from what I see, the datarefs that account for ice accumulation seem to be writable, so a good aircraft author could in theory code his own ice accretion model with a plugin. But I doubt this is a priority for any designer, being it a relatively secondary aspect compared to other ones.

 

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Murmur, 

the factors you list all make sense to me, and are actually the ones mostly used IRL too...

Having moisture simulated would be great, but that isn't actually true of X-Plane, or any of the remaining civil flightsims I used so far, with the possible exception of ELITE which also simulates various types of icing, but I really don't have much insight into how...

There are also a few projects based on Flight Gear for icing simulation.

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Main Simulation Rig:

Ryzen 5600x, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, 1 TB & 500 GB M.2 nvme drives, Win11.

Glider pilot since October 1980...

Avid simmer since 1992...

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It's been a while since I encountered it in the sim, I think it was in a DHC-6 Twin Otter somewhere up in western Canada. I remember it coming on pretty fast and heavy, not much warning. That may be realistic though, based on icing accounts I've read about.

My main complaint about the icing model is that last time I checked, it was one of the few failure modes that can't be disabled in XP settings. VRS for helicopters is another one. It's great to have these features if you want full realism, but there are situations like FSEconomy flights where in-flight icing is just a little more realism than I want to deal with.


X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator on Windows 10 
i7 6700 4.0 GHz, 32 GB RAM, GTX 1660 ti, 1920x1200 monitor

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38 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

My main complaint about the icing model is that last time I checked, it was one of the few failure modes that can't be disabled in XP settings. VRS for helicopters is another one. It's great to have these features if you want full realism, but there are situations like FSEconomy flights where in-flight icing is just a little more realism than I want to deal with.

Never mind about VRS - you'll always be able to recover by simply applying full collective.... Don't even bother using collective and cyclic or a combination of cyclic and anti-torque like in the Vuichard method not necessary ...

Edited by jcomm

Main Simulation Rig:

Ryzen 5600x, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, 1 TB & 500 GB M.2 nvme drives, Win11.

Glider pilot since October 1980...

Avid simmer since 1992...

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Well... I was sitting on the Tarmac at ESNU this past winter during quite the snowy weather. I think I was using the FJS732, although it might have been another aircraft but it was one that has that nifty interactive load-sheet where you kind of click and drag the weights and balance. I have a dual-monitor set up and on the second monitor I was doing some flight planning using skyvector.com when I in the corner of my eye I noticed movement on the load-sheet on the first monitor. I glanced over at the sheet and was dumbfounded as to what was happening. The GW was rising SEVERAL kilos each second. It didn't take long before the numbers were in the red and I was just staring at them wondering what was going on. Then I remembered reading about overly enthusiastic icing so I went ahead and raised the temperature to about +10C. Sure enough the GW started to return to normal. 

That was when I kind of realised that icing really isn't X-planes strong argument. It was utterly ridiculous. 

Don't remember what version it was, think it was early days using Xp11. Has it been fixed?

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Richard

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