Steve Dra

LOL....Captain Sim tried their hand at a copyright-protected TIE fighter a while back....did not work out so well for them. 🤣 A 707 would be epic! I'm old enough to have flown on a few of them...most memorable was my Pan Am flight from KJFK to Rota, Spain (military charter flight) back when I was 12 or so. The sun rose into us as we flew eastward, and it glistening off the nacelles of the 2 engines on my side of the plane is a vision that is still vivid in my mind 50 years later.

I hear ya! 😉 Its funny how much angst there is about rudders and nose wheel steering in MSFS. Its a quandary to set a balance where you get a mix of good control, while feeling the inertia in a turn you're going way to fast into, and make it for every conceivable hardware config tens of thousands of pilots have on their simming rigs. I don't envy any of these devs that have to give us good rudder and nosewheel steering these days....there is a lot of discussion and testing on the beta team over it. The problem is that we represent a tiny fraction of the simming population, so we can't test even 5% of the various hardware configs out there and find a solution for each. Sadly, we have to wait for an individual user to report it, get his settings and hardware, and see if we can replicate and fix. Its not easy to say the least. But in this day and age....most everyone just expects it to "work" for them out of the box. While that is the ultimate goal, its not a good view of reality.

Hey Ron and @Swe_Richard, Our friend @simbol is taking care of the 727. https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/630216-sws-fsreborn-to-make-727/?do=findComment&comment=4917286

Ahhh...I believe you are correct. Thanks for the clarification. 🙂

A lot of folks seem to think that RSR just rambles on about things, and all they get from it is that he talks too much, doesn't seem to say anything meaningful, and tune out after the 1st few sentences. I'll agree that some of it may be musings about things on his mind, but other stuff, like you say abrams, may be strategically placed hints of what is formulating behind the scenes at PMDG. The speculation that flies off the shelf with each of his posts is probably one of the best marketing tools in the simming community. The part that seems to evade detection of many is the fact that just his musings constitute PMDG's own marketing campaign, and who promulgates that throughout our community? We do! Either wittingly or unwittingly, every time a post like this is made, free marketing is happening for PMDG. Is this by design? I'll let you be the judge. Let me ask you, would you rather spend tens of thousands on a dedicated marketing department and the actual marketing itself, or just have the CEO of the company make a few "passing remarks" and get all the free marketing you need for sales by word-of-mouth from the community? 🙂 In the marketing world, publicity is publicity, good or bad...and it helps expose the brand, which more times than not, leads to more sales, regardless of what the community personally thinks of RSR and his methods. The irony is that every time a disgruntled simmer posts here about how PMDG is this or that...how they take too long, how RSR talks too much, etc, they are unwittingly feeding the marketing train...probably much to their dismay if they ever stopped and thought about it. 🤣 This kind'a reminds me of the scene in Pirates of the Carribean where Sparrow steals the British ship, gets their attention on the other ship, and they come and board the one he appears to be stealing. All the time saying how silly he was because they could never set the ship to sail with 2 people. Then when they arrive and board her, Sparrow and Turner hop on the fully-prepared ship, cut the rope and sail off....thanking them for providing them with a fully-prepared ship. Then the final insult to the Commodore is when he starts to ready their new ship to pursue Sparrow, only to find that he's disabled the rudder. LOL And the quote from the person next to the Commodore "That's got to be the best pirate I've ever seen"...one of the best scenes in the movie. I know, it's a bit of a stretch for this situation, but here it is you want to enjoy the scene regardless. .

Hey Ray, if you recall history...your country, who pioneered a lot of the tech behind RaDaR (capitalized as such since it is an acronym for Radio Detection and Ranging) used to call it "Chain Home". It helped your country win the Battle of Britian (I know I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but for the sake of others who are deficient in proper history, hehe) So RaDaR Contact could also be called "Chain Home Reachout" LOL

on the drone camera I'm not sure....I have a button mapped for zoom (and by default, its the + and - keys on the numeric keypad)....and I've never explored editing a camera.cfg file to see if it sticks. I've done it so often with my keyboard, I press the + key for a moment and it goes to 78-81%...so that has been working for me. I open the camera window when I want to fine tune it to 79% for detailed camera work. I was testing some new textures on my Navy paint...at 79% zoom, it just looks....right. (big storms rolling into NAS Key West when I shot this pic)

I've shouted this from the rooftops since MS2020 release. The default zoom level on the drone camera is 50%. 99% of simmers never adjust this to the proper zoom, which after many hours of testing, I've found to be 79% (not 100 like you'd think as that level introduces to reverse fisheye effect) Here is the default drone at 50%...Fisheye gone wild! The wing close to the camera is too looooong while the far wing is too short in this "perspective" Just flat-out looks wrong. Now...zoom in to 79%. After I zoomed to 79%, I panned the camera back to this position because the view was now too close to the aircraft. The proportions of this little 737-700 look just about perfect don't they? Remember...I zoomed in, then MOVED the Camera to achieve the view I wanted. Now with the camera lens zoomed to 79%, and never touching the zoom ring on my camera again...I MOVE the camera to wherever I want it on the plane....so here is the nose of the 737 at 79% zoom and the physical camera placed where I want it. That looks pretty good huh? What folks tend to miss is the completely separate meanings of zoom and move (or pan) with camera manipulation. Sherv is completely right that the proportions of any aircraft can look "off" if the cameraman is just grabbing the zoom ring on his camera lens and zooming...without moving himself (and the camera) to the proper distance from the subject. I pride myself over the decades of being a screenshot artist 1st..then just getting into livery painting when I wanted a livery a freeware group painter refused to paint back in 2003. He finally told me to just to paint the dang thing myself. I taught myself how to, and that's how I got to where I am today. 🙂 I'll leave this long diatribe of camera settings with an actual screenshot that, properly zoomed and positioned, just appeals to my senses when I view it. (lighting, time of day, lens flare on (in this case) other traffic in just the right positions....a lot of thought when into this shot believe it or not) Notice the sun on the flap canoes on the right wing but not the left, the sun reflection just on the front of the belly...the brightness just enough to see the livery. I did not post-process this, I just adjusted the sim to get this shot. Not 100% unedited I guess, but you rarely get the exact conditions you're looking for, and when they occur, by the time you set up the camera, they are gone, LOL. This shot was pretty much default...I just adjusted the time back 2 mins to get the sun where I wanted it to produce the reflection off the fuse and the subtle lighting I was going for.

Actually, all flights in MSFS or any flightsim are unrealistic. If you can hear a leaf blower outside your bedroom window when you're at 35,000 over the middle of the Atlantic....Unrealistic. If your Mom comes into your room when you're on final to Kia Tak (oh wait...you wouldn't be on final to Kia Tak as that airport is closed...my bad), and tells you to get off that computer and clean your room, again...unrealistic. If you wish to only fly realistic routes and such, that is your choice. The "realistic" component of any simmer's experience is relative to the level of real-life suspension they are willing to accept. For you...if its not the real weather, time, airframe, registration, route, ATC, etc...its unrealistic. You of course have a limited range of flights to fly by that preference, but that's your choice. Others have other preferences. BTW....if you are flying your commercial flights in an airliner by yourself...that is completely unrealistic. As is flying one without 1500 hrs min and a license and type-rating to fly said aircraft. So you can take the whole realistic thing as far as you want, as long as remember its your level of realistic, not necessarily all simmer's experience. 😉

LOL...yeah. Funny thing is that if everyone knew about the "8K" texture craze, they'd re-think their desire for them. I'll not get into the minor details, as when I start talking Flightsim livery design and painting, I tend to go overboard, LOL. Call it an occupational hazard (I like to paint, sue me, hehe) 8k textures are not twice the size of 4k...they are 16 times larger! However, when 8k is used logically and only in areas it really matters on the model, you can have a great outcome of both quality and performance. When it comes to CS 8k textures though...they are more concerned about showing you stunning still photos for their sales and marketing stuff than they are for the performance in MSFS. For example....do you really need 8k textures for the APU and main engine interiors? CS seems to think so, and make no mistake...they look lovely. But for some textures you're going to see ONLY on the ground during a walk around and when you get tired of them after the first few times marveling at them...they are stealing your FPS in the sky...who wants that? The iniBuilds A300 is a good example of how to do 8k properly...only used in areas where you'll see it a lot. But it can still be a performance hit on modest systems set to higher settings. A 4090 is not going to care though...so if you have one you'll be saying "They run just fine for me". Hehe, with 24gb of DDR6x memory...they darn well better! Anyway....CS is a horrible Dev however you look at it, and you'll never convince me otherwise. If you must buy from them...do it on the 24hr $9.99 sale they seem to have yearly around Christmas. Don't expect the plane to fly like the real one (without help from some great 3rd party guys out there that mod it), and forget about support...esp after they release the next exterior shell to peddle to the masses.

Remember him and Ariane well....The only commercial member that I recall that ever got kicked off Avsim. Tom HATED him with a passion.

You know LH is always on my list. 😉 And not just because you request it.... rather its in the top 5 of my favorite liveries. 🙂 But expect LH Old colors from me on any airframe that flies it.....not a fan (yet) of the new livery. I miss the yellow. 😞

Haven't really had a chance to get familiar with her...completely focused on a larger, non-Airbus aircraft at the moment. 😉

Hehe....I know how easy this can turn into a "we need XXXX airport" thread....which shows we're hungry to get ALL major international airports in the sim. Heck...in reality, a case could be made for all airports, from a grass strip to KATL (or DFW as I'm not hating the bespoke KTAL in the sim). US Airports seem to always get the linelight, but @F737MAX lists some dingers in there too. EHAM was sure a delight to get as the last major...but we know there are so many more. Let's hope all the great scenery devs at least compare notes so we don't get 3 CYULs at the same time, again, hehe.

I recently started a broccoli garden.....Discuss. 🙂

Thanks Bert. Did a lot of cleanup and got all my sceneries out of community and official folders...all working well. 🙂

One of the best-looking jets in existence! Classic delta shape...the proverbial lawn dart, hehe. Get shots and paint J !!

To add another question to this thread.... I have addon linker and have my community folder setup with links within the app. I also have many Marketplace purchases that show in either the official or official\one store folders. Can I also safely link those in addon linker, then turn them off/on at will as I do with stuff in the community folder? For example, I have the FSDT Chicago O'Hare airport and drzewieckidesign-narita there...could I link them and turn them off in addonlinker?

And some pilot's like to test that theory "on the fly" 🙂 Not belittling an aircraft incident...but nobody was harmed, except for maybe the pilot's ego. 🙂

I have to say in my 20 or so years here, that is the funniest visual I ever got from reading an interesting local phrase from a country I've never been to! 🤣 I actually laughed out loud with that one! Regarding the 727...I know Raul @simbol will create a masterpiece as in a recent interview has stated that the 727 is his all-time favorite airliner...and if you know Raul, his passion in any project is evident...imagine how ramped up that passion will be for a favorite of his? 🙂 I painted the 727 20 years ago on a freeware model, on 1 k maps. Imagine the detail we can produce with 8k maps today!

If you haven't already checked...make sure your sim has not spontaneously set itself to the Legacy flight model. I've had the sim do that (when it was new and many SUs were flying at us), and had a heck of a time with the default Bonanza until I stumbled on to this. Now its the 1st thing I check whenever a plane is not flying right, and everyone else says its working fine for them.

The alluring specter of dropping into the MSFS market is much too overwhelming, even for FSL who's been P3d focused despite the fact its not the market of choice for the majority of simmers. I can almost guarantee that in those months of silence, not one minute on developer time was put to P3d bug fixing, rather trying to get the Concorde into MSFS. They are probably now just seeing how far behind they are, even with the full steam efforts to grasp the completely different coding they have to deal with now. This is similar to what Captain Sim did...working on a rather good P3d 767, promising to keep developing and refining, in addition to releasing a highly anticipated freighter...making not one peep over many months on the progress of fixes or the freighter. Then one day just announcing their 1st MSFS product. Since then, they released the freighter as a pax model with a painted-on main cargo door, and not one version-update to the base 767 since. Don't even ask about their comical attempt to bring the 737 model past a late beta stage, despite all their promises. They still won't admit that P3d work for them is dead, but then again they never were good at communicating things like that. Ray, you're going to have to move to MSFS if you want to see a truly revolutionary Concorde in a flightsim, as FSL has sadly just announced . Don't worry, you have a lot of simmers here willing to help you through the transition. 🙂 Unless they address the P3d bugs as an afterthought...You have the final, complete, and "finished" version of the P3d Concorde on your PC. 😞

Good read on the topic here: CAMERAS.cfg: Is the 'transition' property broken? - Questions & Community Discussions / Aircraft - MSFS DevSupport (flightsimulator.com) Bottom line...the "Transition" property is what should control this...as of September 2023...it is still not working properly in MSFS. I too have tried both options (0 and 1)...and neither snaps the camera between views. We can only hope its addressed one day.

I talked to Rob about this Anti-Ice issue, and since he's determined to model the MAX as close to real life as possible, he's going to add this issue in the plane. However, since some inexperienced simmers may misuse the anti-ice feature in the sim, and may severely damage their engine inlet on the virtual MAX they purchased from PMDG, he has decided to cancel the MAX project for fear of liability from all the angry simmers who now have a damaged MAX. Thanks a lot for pointing out this glaring issue...now we'll never get a PMDG MAX! 🤨 /sarcasm mode off.

Outstanding pics, plane and paint :) Have not picked it up yet....too busy painting a slightly bigger plane :)