Hurricanes & Tornados

[bonchie 2,305]

No way in hell I'm flying closer than 20 miles to a supercell and there's not a DPE that would give you a rating if you told him/her you would. 

But to each his own. The point is, it's almost impossible to realistically model tornadoes in a sim because of the nature of them, plus there's no reason to put any time into something that's so inconsequential to real world aviation. 

Seeing a water spout is far different than a real tornado, but that too would be practically impossible to model unless you just make them randomly appear. 

Edited May 12, 2020 by bonchie

[Skip Talbot 17]

2 hours ago, bonchie said:

No way in hell I'm flying closer than 20 miles to a supercell and there's not a DPE that would give you a rating if you told him/her you would. 

Oh sure there is. It's a small circle of people, but there are some legit and sanctioned reasons that people fly in the vicinity of tornadoes such as the tornado research missions NOAA conducts in their P3, and it's routine for the larger media markets in the Plains and Midwest to send a chopper up in front of a tornado to cover it live. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQBQOWTFPDY

And some GA pilots are doing it for a variety of reasons like photography in our case. We did most of our flights over unpopulated areas, but we once tracked a tornado warned supercell through the Omaha Class C. I wish I could have seen the controller's face when we called approach and told him what we were doing. He approved us though! Apparently everyone else was waiting on the ground or had already diverted and we had the Class C to ourselves.  

So I agree that it's a waste of time and impractical to add tornadoes into the stock free flight mode of flight simulator, and that such an encounter is unrealistic for most pilots. I think carrier ops, Red Bull courses, and air racing are insane, and I'm never going to do anything like that in real life. Part of the allure of flight simulator, however, is doing things that you can't in real life, or would otherwise never get the chance to. Those add-on missions in FSX Acceleration were a blast and breathed a lot of life into that game. You might say the UFO chase in the Super Hornet mission was a ridiculous and unrealistic addition, but the Navy apparently just confirmed that this does indeed happen lol. The point is that, although 99.99% of GA is not conducting aerial storm chasing, low level aerobatics, or weird military missions, these are actual facets of real flying that people might like to try in a simulator environment. 

Instead of asking Asobo for tornadoes, maybe it would be better to ask them to leave the door open for third party developers to implement them by allowing sufficient access to the weather system via the SDK. It does not seem like a stretch to add a conical cloud below the thunderstorm base and a vortex in the wind field to the stock supercell Asobo has already implemented. A storm chasing add-on game where you get to fly C-130 Hurricane Hunter missions or fly a news helicopter tracking a tornado going through downtown DFW might be hugely popular.

[shawty1984 106]

3 hours ago, bonchie said:

There's plenty of pictures of things on Google involving awful decision making. 

That wasn't the point though was it. 

[FAZZ3 815]

Guys we can rely on our Master cloud generator artist and VFX Guru @mp15. Please use your proprietary cloud creation technologies and decades of experience in advanced weather simulation to build tornadoes and hurricane addons. 

Edited May 12, 2020 by FAZZ3

[mp15 138]

@FAZZ3 i like clouds design but not twisters or tornados sorry, but i cannot help.

[AerOdyssey 240]

Just now, mp15 said:

but i cannot help.

👎

[mp15 138]

I been told once not to post my personal art work in these forums or something like that plus a tornado requires a decent amount of work that in not willing to do unless It will be a payed job and useful...

[mp15 138]

I can make great clouds? Yes. I can make a powerful and Fury tornado? Yes.

@cmpbellsjc was clear to me, i cannot post my art work in this forum, and i follow the forum rules.

iam not an official dev, i am a freelance contractor, i can do the best Twister in One week? yes. im available? Yes.

but im not cheap, i tell you.

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

32 minutes ago, mp15 said:

 

@cmpbellsjc was clear to me, i cannot post my art work in this forum, and i follow the forum rules.

Correct as it’s not applicable to MSFS as it stands now. 

 

32 minutes ago, mp15 said:

 

iam not an official dev, i am a freelance contractor, i can do the best Twister in One week? yes. im available? Yes.

We’ve heard. No need to preach to the choir. 

 

33 minutes ago, mp15 said:

but im not cheap, i tell you.

So you’ve said.

 

Once the sim is released and you’ve created a product that your going to either put to market or releases as freeware, you can make a post about it. Until then, telling us what you can do, repeatedly I might add, or how expensive you are has little bearing on what’s currently transpiring.

[sightseer 895]

@Skip Talbot  Is that an active twister in your second shot? (under the flap).  It looks like it but its hard to tell without everything in motion.  I tend to think that what many expect to see as a twister often isnt that dramatic in appearance from the air even though its appearance and destruction from the ground are terrifying.

I used to live near Seagoville.  I had moved to northeast Dallas by the time a twister came through the area I used to live and I watched on the news the images of tractor trailers  being sucked up into the sky and whirled about.  It was an amazing site.  Later that day a tornado came much closer to where I then lived.

I doubt tornados can be included by default but I do hope we get wall clouds and shelf clouds and just truly ominous looking stuff that often does occur.

Edited May 14, 2020 by sightseer

[Skip Talbot 17]

  

2 hours ago, sightseer said:

@Skip Talbot  Is that an active twister in your second shot? (under the flap).  It looks like it but its hard to tell without everything in motion.  I tend to think that what many expect to see as a twister often isnt that dramatic in appearance from the air even though its appearance and destruction from the ground are terrifying.

I used to live near Seagoville.  I had moved to northeast Dallas by the time a twister came through the area I used to live and I watched on the news the images of tractor trailers  being sucked up into the sky and whirled about.  It was an amazing site.  Later that day a tornado came much closer to where I then lived.

I doubt tornados can be included by default but I do hope we get wall clouds and shelf clouds and just truly ominous looking stuff that often does occur.

 The wide shot is a classic tornado warned supercell, the middle shot is a wall cloud, and the last is dust being kicked up by outflow winds and then sucked back in by the storm's updraft. Not a tornado, but a dramatic example of a storm interacting with the ground. We found it to be notoriously difficult to be in the right place at the right time for the tornado shot. There are only a small subset of situations in which you can attempt these flights. Then you have to be able to loiter in front of the supercell for potentially hours, and we had to abandon the storm to get fuel. Here's video of the encounter if you're interested: 

Such endeavors are rather impractical and potentially quite dangerous (also nauseating!), which is why I'd love to be able to do some of this flying in flight simulator instead, even if it's just a taste of what it's actually like to fly in front of a supercell. 

[eslader 1,783]

On 5/12/2020 at 12:09 AM, Skip Talbot said:

Maybe a storm chasing add-on game?

I didn't realize you were that Skip Talbot. Nice to see that you sim, too.

There's already a tornado chasing game in early access on Steam. I have no idea how good/realistic it is, though the demo video isn't all that promising.  I think there's another one on Kickstarter trying to get attention too. I'm kinda opposed to developing those games though. Remember when Twister came out and all the yahoos started imitating the movie? The morons made chasing more dangerous than the tornadoes ever did. At least with flight simulation, there's a high barrier to entry for actual flying so you don't get the stupids bleeding into real life. With chasing, all you need is a car and gas money to create problems for everyone else. 😉

 

 

[Tuskin38 6,499]

There is a cyclone right now right  east of India heading north into Bangladesh, could be interesting to fly through.

Edited May 18, 2020 by Tuskin38

[John JF 98]

Hello , let me say how fantastic it is to see one of my favourite storm chasers and YouTubers in this forum. 

As a kid growing up here in Britain where we hardly ever have severe weather my mind was blown by Tornadoes and storms. I saw a documentary about a news station in Oklahoma that chases storms and broadcasts live footage from a chopper. Always thought it would be brilliant to recreate in a sim.  

Realistically As Skip says It would probably be best for third party to create this, it's sort of a niche thing. I read that REX skyforce already includes supercell structure and tornadoes but I've never seen any user screenshots of this, I guess most people wouldn't know where or what to look for. 

At the moment I'm just looking forward to realistic CB's, after jumping to xplane and dealing with that weather (or lack of) engine for the past 3 years! 

[eslader 1,783]

1 hour ago, jonsonwonson said:

I read that REX skyforce already includes supercell structure and tornadoes but I've never seen any user screenshots of this,

 

Nice little wall cloud from Rex.  It's not really all that fantastic - it almost looks like someone made it by using the cloning brush in photoshop - has that blotchy fake look to it. Here's a real one for comparison:

But considering it's a flight simulator and not a severe storm simulator, it ain't bad.

 

Does Rex use a different weather source than Active Sky? AS uses METARs, which isn't super current (you wouldn't base tornado warnings off of METARs) and also does not distinguish between a funnel cloud and a tornado (they're both called FC in METAR-speak and that's all you get unless they get more verbose in the RMK section). To really do a good job of simulating something as quick-changing as a tornadic storm, you'd need to be pointing the weather engine elsewhere, like radar which I would think would be really hard to get home-use-priced software to interpret accurately, or the NWS's warning system, but then you'd need to get it to accurately parse plain text and translate it to the right geographic location.