Can MFS20 cope with supersonic flight

[Ray Proudfoot 8,960]

I'm impressed wirh all I've seen to date but most of the aircraft have been GA and speeds are low. What I would like to know is how the simulator can cope with an aircraft capable of supersonic flight.

Scenario: FL570 at Mach 2.0 over sparsely populated land such as Northern Canada or Saudi Arabia. At 20 nautical miles a minute can the scenery be depicted quick enough without buffering assuming the user is streaming and has a connection speed > 25Mbps?

[siggy 154]

"Time acceleration" would also be affected.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,960]

51 minutes ago, siggy said:

"Time acceleration" would also be affected.

Indeed it would. A B737-800 at Mach 0.82 with x2.5 acceleration would be equivalent to Concorde with no acceleration.

Edited October 27, 2019 by Ray Proudfoot

[Murmur 3,943]

Good question Ray, I wondered the same. Apart from the connection speed, will the scenery/rendering engine cope in terms of texture loading/fps?

I also wonder if the flight model includes compressibility effects (subsonic/supersonic flight), being it completely new. We'll possibly know more on the aerodynamics episode.

[exodus1977 37]

My understanding from the videos is that the sim will tweak itself on the fly based on your internet connection. So, if you are Mach 2 over New York, it might throttle back the scenery. But if you are at FL570, it might not matter because the building/land detail is so much lower. And, as a last point, this is probably where flight routes and use of cache will help. You can cache the data of a route on your computer locally. So if this is a typical route that is cached, it’s probably just up to you rig to run it.

 

[Ray Proudfoot 8,960]

12 minutes ago, exodus1977 said:

My understanding from the videos is that the sim will tweak itself on the fly based on your internet connection. So, if you are Mach 2 over New York, it might throttle back the scenery. But if you are at FL570, it might not matter because the building/land detail is so much lower. And, as a last point, this is probably where flight routes and use of cache will help. You can cache the data of a route on your computer locally. So if this is a typical route that is cached, it’s probably just up to you rig to run it.

I won't be flying supersonic over populated areas so we can forget Mach 2 over New York. 😁 For 90% plus of Concorde flights it will be over ocean or places that I described in my first post. I imagine rendering the ocean will take few resources and at the altitude Concorde flies to the state of the ocean would not need to be drawn. You're not going to see waves 10 miles up.

If caching of a fixed route is possible (but with wx updated of course) that would be acceptable.

Once subsonic Concorde flies slightly faster than conventional aircraft (Mach 0.95 compared to 0.85) so if the sim can cope with Boeings and Airbuses then Concorde should be fine but it's supersonic flight I'm most concerned about as the flight dynamics will be very different.

I imagine this is only a question the development team can answer but there are people out there who are keen to develop a Concorde for MFS20 and they will need to know the answer as will all those keen to see a 64-bit Concorde (or any other supersonic aircraft) in this tremendous sim.

[JB3DG 225]

Most military aircraft can barely exceed mach 1 at low altitude. Mach 2 is strictly the domain of high altitude.

[royalwin 22]

Since streaming costs are non-linear with altitude, I'd expect 600 kts at ground level will be much more stress than 1200 kts at high altitude.

[KillerKlient 92]

yes

[Ray Proudfoot 8,960]

1 hour ago, royalwin said:

Since streaming costs are non-linear with altitude, I'd expect 600 kts at ground level will be much more stress than 1200 kts at high altitude.

No aircraft I’m aware of could travel at 600kts at zero altitude. That’s Mach 0.90. It would exceed tMO.

[Nedo68 533]

you can travel in google earth much much faster then Mach 2 without streaming problem, i am sure FS2020 can handle this speeds easy...

if not it will be called FS1916 😉

[Ray Proudfoot 8,960]

11 minutes ago, Nedo68 said:

you can travel in google earth much much faster then Mach 2 without streaming problem, i am sure FS2020 can handle this speeds easy...

if not it will be called FS1916 😉

But it’s not Google Earth, it’s Bing. And there’s more to it than the scenery. The flight mechanics of the new sim have to be able to handle supersonic aircraft. It really is complicated and only the development team can answer the question.

[royalwin 22]

As JB3DG mentioned above, modern military A/C can exceed M1.0 at sea level.  I'm pretty sure that  F-111 drivers have seen >900 KIAS low level.  Crazy fast!  

I am not aware of any civilian A/C that could fly that fast down low.  Nonetheless, the point I meant to make was that this sim should be much less stressed by 20 NM/min at high altitude than by 7 NM/min at low altitude, just as far as worst case analysis.

[NAVPI 34]

1 hour ago, KillerKlient said:

yes

I cannot help but to second this most succinct answer to the original question: yes.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,960]

@royalwin, you’re missing the point. I’m asking if the sim engine can handle supersonic flight. Only a developer can answer that question. In other words, can a Concorde that flew accurately in FSX / P3D fly as accurately in MFS20? It all depends on whether the program can accurately depict the various elements of supersonic flight. It is not a given. It needs explicitly stating by the team.