Saw this comic today and could not help but think of you people.

Actually a friend has soared quite high over a big agricultural / forest fire, in the early 2000s.

It's really not advisable, and the kind of turbulence can be really nasty and intense...

 

Edited March 3, 20233 yr by cagarini

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/284954-stma-hph-304s-shark-18m-sailplane-roll-out/&_fromLogin=1

8 minutes ago, cagarini said:

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/284954-stma-hph-304s-shark-18m-sailplane-roll-out/&_fromLogin=1

I don't think I've seen anyone as passionate about gliders as you, Jose.  

🙂

8 hours ago, GoranM said:

I don't think I've seen anyone as passionate about gliders as you, Jose.  

🙂

Indeed Goran :-), although I always dreamed of occupying my working days as Janov 🙂

And, a very interesting video by Langer about the Self-Sustained electric powered version of the Shark:

Flying SHARK 🦈🦈 | First Flight with HPH 304 ES - YouTube

I should do more soaring in X-Plane 12, it's really cool that now the wake turbulence from the towing aircraft is simulated.

1 hour ago, Biology said:

I should do more soaring in X-Plane 12, it's really cool that now the wake turbulence from the towing aircraft is simulated.

Hmmmm 😞

unfortunately quite detached from reality...

Austin chose to model wake turbulence in a way that is pretty much detached from reality when IRL you get to low under the tow plane...

You're mostly affected by the prop slisptream than but other factors (like the downwash from the tow plane wings as if it was an airliner...)

29 minutes ago, cagarini said:

Hmmmm 😞

unfortunately quite detached from reality...

Austin chose to model wake turbulence in a way that is pretty much detached from reality when IRL you get to low under the tow plane...

You're mostly affected by the prop slisptream than but other factors (like the downwash from the tow plane wings as if it was an airliner...)

You should email Austin! During the early access there was a major issue that affected swept wings and it quickly got fixed with the inputs of Mike Vivaldi and others. It's best when issues like that are reported during early days of X-Plane 12 before the flight model is more or less matured and developers already tweaked their aircraft for it. As I didn't know how it's supposed to exactly behave it still felt really nice that I couldn't stay behind the tow aircraft without any consequences like I used to, but I hope it gets even better.

Edited March 10, 20233 yr by Biology

38 minutes ago, Biology said:

You should email Austin! During the early access there was a major issue that affected swept wings and it quickly got fixed with the inputs of Mike Vivaldi and others. It's best when issues like that are reported during early days of X-Plane 12 before the flight model is more or less matured and developers already tweaked their aircraft for it. As I didn't know how it's supposed to exactly behave it still felt really nice that I couldn't stay behind the tow aircraft without any consequences like I used to, but I hope it gets even better.

I know, been there, done that...

Sometimes it's not that easy, and I have given up contacting Austin directly. That's history for me unfortunately 😕

In XP12 LR has mentioned a couple times fine tuning of convective weather, namely thermals and how they're modelled.

Well, while this is good to have, I have noticed that just like in previous versions of XP, if you enable real world weather and then go flying in a place where for instance the forecasts in Windy tell you you should be able to find excellent thermals, you arrive there and eventually even find the nice cumulus, but no thermals at all... 😕

If you go to the weather settings and down to the thermals section you'll find they're zeroed... The most you can do is manually editing that value.

When using ASXP12, which has just recently "joined the party" the thermals section has a default value which is always the same and around one hundred feet per minute. It's WIP and I guess HiFi will probably fine tune this aspect of the simulation of their injected weather.

Then in XP there are never blue thermals 😕  A blue thermals day is not possible because AFAIK the "mechanism" LR chose to base their thermal simulation in is dependent on the cumulus cloud bases 😕

Two aspects that I would really like to see addressed both by LR and HiFi in future updates 🙂

On a side note of comparison of how thermals are modelled in MFS 2020, there, while the thermals themselves, supposedly based on convection modelling, are lousily modelled and completely detached from reality in the way they form and offer lift to a glider, they have the positive of being automatically set depending on the weather conditions and even on the terrain bellow, specially interesting and useful when using real world weather - a much more consistent way of modelling it, I must admit..., which was / is very effective in Silentwings soaring sim (2007), and Condorsoaring (2006).

Edited March 11, 20233 yr by cagarini

But truth is without doubt weather is one big step ahead in xp12, and as I have said on various threads, the latest updates have brought xp12 weather to the top in terms of detail. 

 

Also this particular feature is only of interest for soaring, and it's something  asxp12 might  probably end up fine tuning. But it can be too complex to model, so doesn't make sense to be modelled as a base feature. 

 

Otoh, we can always manually edit the thermals and make them as strong as it pleases us for a particular situation.