An hint of good things to come - Soaring Weather.

[jcomm 5,939]

I was finally able to get MFS to work together with xCSoar and TopHat, the two soaring & navigation applications I use IRL for my flights, together with an LXNav Nano 3 for the logging & backup ...

So, having in mind that in one of the past Q&A sessions ASOBO mentioned the refinement of weather taking into consideration factors like that of insolation, based even on terrain characteristics ( Albedo ), I decided to pick the Discus 2c and check it.

A few days ago the conditions IRL were great, with long flights accross almost all of the Portuguese territory possible and convection levels ensuring 2400m AMSL. Yesterday it wasn't a great day ( IRL ) but it was flyable and I was very positively impressed by how MFS pretty much reproduced a pattern of thermals along the ride.

Actually I was particularly impressed by how starting from LPMN ( my RL BOP ) at the time I started the sim ( around 21:00 LT ) and then shffting the time back to around 14:00 LT ( always under Live Weather ) started creating this rising currents at places that are actually known by me IRL for being nice "climbing spots", and with additional intensity because since the T profile was that of 21:00 LT and the insolation the one from 14:00 earlier that day, additional instability caused thermals to get stronger than they had been IRL, which looks cool and coherent !

Was also great to finally be able to consistently use xCSoar for a small task ( 55 km  triangle ).

As much as I can be critic about the poor flight dynamics in the gliders I have so far used in MFS (*), at the same time I couldn't resist sharing this rather positive view of soaring weather potential ! 

Looking fwd into SU10 and the chance to even be able to visualize this currents, and hope they can refine it with additional factors like wind-on-thermals, specially when shear is present, and so on.

(*) But I do believe that the Flight Dynamics in MFS will get further refined, and converge into something better, even if only for the "within normal flight envelope" states. 

Edited May 2, 2022 by jcomm
typos ...