I know there are more important suggestions for more realistic navigation and proper FMS operation and whatnot but I've always found the Shift+F5+# method of opening & closing doors to be a real pain... especially after the main door.How about if a door is supposed to be openable make it "hot" in a spot view so I can click on it and it will open?One more dumb suggestion while I'm at it. We all know that contrails are controlled by temperature & humidity & so on. We all also know that in FS04 they happen at exactly 30,000 feet. It would be great if they were done realistically in FSX but failing that how about putting the altitude at which contrails appear into a config file so that on a given day I might choose to have them start at 26,532 feet?Okay... dumb suggestions I admit... but stuff that has bugged me. :)

contrails in FS2004 are dependent on atmospheric conditions already.

Well I don't know about your system but on mine those atmospheric conditions always add up to 30,000.0 feet. http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/144042.gif

> How about if a door is supposed to be openable make it "hot" in a spot view so I can click on it and it will open?Theres enough keys to remember already, then 3rd party addon guys start defining their own key combinations for their products. I wish all animations would be clickable.

hmm, must have been something else then that I had streaming after my DC3 last year flying over Idaho at 12000ft...Or last week flying over Utah at 25000...Or the contrails must have been invisible over the Caribbean last month at 35000.

Guy I doubt neither your sincerity nor your veracity but on my system it doesn't matter if you are flying over the Caribbean or the Arctic if you have a contrail you are at or above 30,000. :)

"Theres enough keys to remember already, then 3rd party addon guys start defining their own key combinations for their products. I wish all animations would be clickable."Eggszactly! ;)

Speaking of making the door animations clickable, a great example would be the virtual cockpit of Owen Hewitt's Bell JetRanger. He utilized a hidden gauge feature to make each slider window openable by clicking and grabbing on the handle. To open it, all you'd have to do is drag the mouse a certain way. I think that same type of feature should be applied, so we're not having to enter a series of keystrokes.** EDITED FOR SPELLING ** lol.

Intersting point, you could then also open access panels, engine cowls etc - would be great to open an access panel fo the cargo hold door controls, and there to be a gauge there that you can click, and then the door opens :-)For the time being I just re-asign the door key to D :(

Hi there,I believe the initiation of a contrail in FS9 is a mix of both.If you look in the FS9 Aircraft Container SDK there is a parameter called "max_contrail_temperature", defined as "Ambient temperature, in Celsius, in which engine vapor contrails will turn on. The default value is about -39 degrees Celsius for turbine engines. For piston engines, the contrail effect is turned off unless a temperature value is set here." I seem to remember that some aircraft developers (or AI "tweakers") adjusted these parameters in their .cfg files to lower the altitude threshold.On the other hand the description of the effect parameter named "Contrail" that actually calls the contrail fx file merely states "Contrail effect triggered above 30000 ft for jets".I interpret that as jets generally showing a contrail above 30,000ft. To make it appear at lower altitudes one needs to adjust the "max_contrail_temperature" value for individual aircraft.Cheers, Holger

Holger,I think you have found the truth of this situation. I don't do a lot of high altitude flying since I tend to like to fly more in the Cub & Jenny than I do 737s & 747s. Even though I have 2 3rd party 737s & 2 3rd party 747s most of my 30K+ flying has been done with the default airliners. I'd probably get different results with the 3rd party ones.As for the DC-3... I don't own the MAAM DC-3/C47... with the default DC-3 I took off from Idaho Falls earlier and after 1,000 foot AGL passes over Rigby, Rexburg, & Sugar City I headed North and climbed as high as I could. I couldn't get it above 17,500 and got no contrail. I'm going to try the experiment again with the MAAM B-25 and I'm betting that I'll get a contrail. I'll check back on that.Thanks for the clarification! :)

Holger,Using the MAAM B-25 Briefing Time I easily climbed to 22,000 (could have gone higher but lacked the time) and picked up contrails at 21,000.You would seem to have nailed it... by default it is 30,000 for jets and not at all for props... factors can be set to be more realistic in 3rd party aircraft. Or so it appears to me. :)Thank again...

In a VC (or presumably a 2D panel) you can already have a gauge (or VC hotspot) that controls the main door. I imagine that could probably be done for other stuff too. Spot view, as far as I know, doesn't support clickable hotspots at all so that would probably require a bunch of work to do. With the variety of animations already available (at least 4 seperate "door" entries, spoilers, tail hook, folding wings, concorde nose visor, cowl flaps, and water rudder) plus, apparently, VC hotspot controlled animations, there's a lot of options for aircraft designers as is. It's up to the individual designers, and not every feature may documented or easily seen. (Did you know that in Mike Stone's Goose you can open the pilot side window via the concorde nose control?) I do wonder about the three drop tank entries (release all drop tanks, release drop tank 1, release drop tank 2) in the assignments list though, didn't see anything in the SDK about using them."Let me help you out. You're cleared to taxi any way you can to any runway you see."

Hi Tom,you're welcome. However, I'd also say that this is a bit of a clunky approach to modeling a physical phenomenon so I'd agree with your original suggestion/request for having contrails triggered without hard-coding them in the cfg files of individual aircraft.Come to think of it I believe we had the topic of contrails before in this very forum. Need to dig it our again...Cheers, Holger

If you want to see just what model creators are capable of doing now with FS2004, check out the BN-2 Islander from here:http://www.m-r-software.de/Make sure you read the manual, and shut off the magnetos before you open the door."Let me help you out. You're cleared to taxi any way you can to any runway you see."