blave

A correction to what I said (I haven't touched FSX in a while) I used to use the Jepp data that was closest to the RXP 430/530 database contained at the time.

Maybe I'm missing something but I've always been mystified by the folks that want, current, real nav data. From what I think I know, the FSX "world" is several years old w.r.t. airport/navaid/etc. locations -- wouldn't you want navdata that is matched to FSX's airport/navaid data? Yes, it won't be "real" as compared to Today but it will work fine with the static world that FSX captured however many years ago it was released. I used to run the Jepp moving map app on a 2nd PC and always used the navdata version that was closest to what FSX contains... Please 'splain it to me Lucy; I must be (as I said) missing something. cheers, Dave B.

I have perused the DCS site re: the "World beta" and see nothing at all about it -- I looked at the blog, News, and the store. Nada. cheers, Dave.

Yes, I kinda figured that the site redesign is pretty much a done deal. More than anything I was annoyed by the condescending response that the OP got. BTW my biggest beef with the New Look is the 2-column arrangement of news.... Dave.

Wow. What a presumptuous and egotistical reply to what I regard as a very valid comment about the New Look. Frankly, I hate the New Look. "Just saying"... I've been an almost daily visitor to avsim for somewhere around 10 years, and I've never had a problem with the home page organization. I've bided my time, thinking I might get used to the new look. Well, your antagonistic reply to the OP prompted me to weigh in. I Don't Like It. To me it seems like a change for the sake of making a change. In my "real world" job I'm involved in my company's web site presence, so I know a little bit about this stuff. A site redesign should have some kind of value-add to the visitor and frankly, I don't see any benefit. In contrast, my eye moves around the home page a lot more than it used to and that's A BAD THING. Avsim has been my go-to site for flight sim news but to be honest, I'm starting to look for an alternative. (Sorry Tom -- you've been doing an awesome job all these years but someone has lost the key to the place.) Dave B. San Jose, CA

Observation: this thread is a classic indication of why some folks are so bullish on Flight -- it's bringing new folks that might never've touched the traditional MS-FS products to the fold. That can only be a good thing for flight simulation and perhaps real world aviation. The latter can use all the help it can get for various reasons, and who knows how many Flight jockeys will get a hankering to try out the real thing.I have been a bit mystified thus far by how much effort Avsim has been putting into their Flight coverage -- perhaps this kind of new interest is why. I might be a bit slow on the uptake...Now, I'm off to fly "my" Aerosoft OV-10 Bronco in FSX, thank you very much :Nerd: . Here's hoping that someday such wonderful third-party add-ons will be a possibility in the new sim.Dave B.

I must confess that I'm suprised that "flight model" is not in your priorities list -- why is that?Just curious. As a (somewhat lapsed) IRL pilot I'm surprised that that would not be near the top of your list. Or maybe you've just given up, like I have on the helicopter modeling in FSX 8^) .cheers,Dave B.

Negative. It's a "spoonerism" of my first and last name, bestowed on me by another Dave B. that I worked with, long before I'd ever seen that movie.right then,Dave.

Nice!Some notes about the airports on the Big Island. Many of the purple airports are or were ag-use-only grass strips, and from what I can tell from some extensive Google Earthing of all of these a few years ago, most of them aren't used anymore. The number of airports that you can actually land at in real life is quite small: Kona, Upolu, Waimea, and Hilo (to my knowledge anyway). Bradshaw is of course mil-only.I visited the Honoka'a airstrip by bicycle a couple years ago. It wasn't usable... I also looked for the Mountain View strip one time by car and couldn't find it, but I have to admit I didn't try very hard as my wife was with me and there was shopping to be done 8^) .aloha,Dave.

Give Red Water Cafe a try next time you're in Waimea. Not nearly as spendy and very, very good. I think it's run by the folks that used to run Fukushima's in Kona, and in fact when they first took over the building in Waimea it was called that.Dave B.

Right after I posted my op-ed above, I talked to the guy that tuned my new system for FSX. He's surprisingly bullish about Flight and as a result I'm going to give it another look, and maybe buy the rest of the islands.I also learned that the Maule has an autopilot -- since I didn't see any key/controller assignments for an AP I assumed that Flight wouldn't be supporting such nonsense but I'm starting to think that maybe the assignments lists are dynamic depending on which aircraft is loaded.That all said, I'm still underwhelmed by the scenery things I mentioned. Hopefully there will be aftermarket scenery that will address this for at least some areas.to Noah: point noted about using landmarks to find aerocaches... Maybe I underestimated this sim, but honestly the fact that it's hosted out of the same e-commerce thingy as X-Box titles didn't start me out with warm fuzzies 8^) .Dave.

I hate to jump onto the naysayer pickup truck, but I spent a couple hours in Flight yesterday, and although I'll probably spend a little time in it here and there because I really like the Icon A5 airplane, I'm not impressed overall.My initial impression was pretty good; I started at Kona Airport, and it's a reasonably accurate depiction of the buildings and even the rental car lots to the east of the airport are depicted. But, I was anxious to see how they did with Kamuela/Waimea up to the north, as I am very familiar with that town. I was trying not to get my hopes up, but nevertheless was disappointed to see basic landclass and what I'm assuming to be Autogen buildings (many of which are far larger than anything found there IRL). It's not pretty at all at low level, with nonsensical roads and rough transitions from "town" to "country".Then I moved over to Hilo, thinking that maybe they'd given a shot at depicting the historic waterfront part of the town reasonably well... Nope, more landclass/autogen. Bummmmer.My last flight was out of the Bradshaw AAF base, on Saddle Road between the two big volcanos. I was thinking I'd pop up to the observatories on Mauna Kea to see what they did there, but the A5 will barely get off the ground at (what I believe to be) about 6000' MSL. So it seems they've retained the modeling of altitude pretty well. But at that point I decided to bail on Flight and move over to FSX with my wonderful new Aerosoft OV-10 Bronco -- man I love that plane but that's another story.Anyway, although it's called The Big Island for a reason, it's not that big from an FS scenery standpoint, and I was expecting more accurate (photoreal?) content and more accurate buildings. It's because of this that I don't expect I'll be buying the rest of the islands. (In comparison, the MegasceneryX Oahu product for FSX is much nicer to look at and fly around...)Speaking of buying addons, I really dislike the new Nickle and Dime To Death way this works. If airplanes were five bucks that would be one thing, but $15 for the Maule? Nah.cheers to all,Dave B.

There is a way: you'll need to install FSX on your laptop and install both RXP and the planes you want to fly on it. Then you can use the multiplayer shared cockpit thingy to enable the RXP gauge to track your flight.I have verified this, in the last couple days in fact since I just built a new FSX machine and have my old P4 box sitting next to it, networked; the latter has FSX and various RXP products installed. What I haven't yet verified is if you can enter a flight plan on the 2nd machine and have the 1st machine follow it... I shall have to try that real soon.cheers,Dave.

Santa: please bring me a resurrection of the FS product line, by "somebody". This is the first time I've been here (at Avsim's forums) in a long time. I used to check it daily but since MS Kilt It I have lost my FS muse.Is it just me?BTW before posting this I tried to go to The Hangar per a pinned post here but that link is dead. (update: found it, but... well, someone asked about my FS xmas list....)cheers,Dave B.

Gman,Please stop shouting - I'm already almost deaf in one ear. Yes we get it that you're good with HTML tags...Dave B.

Totally concur. This is one of the best add-on airplanes ever made for both FS9 and FSX. It's a great VFR airplane, and also the various panel views make it an awesome IFR mount as well.It's framerate friendly too - I'm not sure how that do this but I'm not axin' questions :( . IMO this is one of the best choices for a fast, "accurate" (caveat: I've never flown an SF.260, but would like to!), framerate-friendly, fun to fly simulated airplanes you can buy.Cowardly disclaimer: I am biased against most (all?) Piper airplanes, only because of the single door on the pax side. I am claustrophobic :( . The Flight1 Meridian was a fine choice in its day but has no FSX equivalent.Also, I always questioned Piper's placement of some panel instruments - e.g. the manifold pressure gauge, which should be a lot closer to the "six pack", or at least, not right next to my knee. IMO Piper cockpits are not as well laid out as the competition. (My impressions are based on the Archer and Arrow models.) At any rate, I think that the SF.260 is a great choice for what you're after.Dave B.

So, is this purely a visual rework of the stock 206? IOW, has the flight model been tweaked?I personally don't care much how an FSX add-on looks, if it flies just like the default aircraft. Your 206 does LOOK nice. but you used the term "full rework" which in my book involves more than eye candy.Or - more to the point - I'd pay for an FSX helicopter that has realistic flight model features such as autorotation, settling with power, LTE, etc. AFAIK only the Dodosim folks have come close to these things, and they haven't yet released an FSX version of their FS9 product. Are you trying to address the flight model?Dave B

Wrong - this "discount" is nothing new. X-Plane has periodically had its price dropped, then he (Austin) puts up a notice "hurry before the price goes back up!". Seems to work well for him... Especially now; I bet he's rubbing his hands together in glee at the news about ACES.Also, it's not a bargin, or even a bargain, if the flight models are porked. I have had various versions of XP since v3.6 I think it was, and in all this time the helicopter models have only gotten worse (I'm talking about the included stock aircraft - I don't know about the payware ones). Most of them are unflyable, and none feel realistic. (Brent Sumpter's add-on helos fly fairly well.) Now, the piston airplanes seem to be OK in general; the Piaggio twin turboprop is pretty nice; not sure about the jets as I've never flown a fighter or airliner.Austin doesn't need our support - he's making money hand over fist with his iPhone/Touch addons (I must confess to having one of them - a neat novelty to show friends). Also, he's got some eye-poppingly expensive variations on X-Plane that he licenses with a hardware device, in order to extract some extra dough from the professional flight training world. Similarly, his "glass cockpit" stuff that emulates Avidyne, etc. costs $500 for non-commercial use.As is probably obvious I'm no big fan of XP. I (stupidly?) keep buying each new version, hoping that the things I care about get better. I did buy v9 a while back as it is significantly improved over v8 in some ways as the demo shows, but it was only after I bought it that I started to see little niggly things (again) that once again sent me back to focusing on FSX.I also find this latest "we'll keep the price at $39 as a big favor to those poor souls that have been abandoned by MS" to be in very poor taste.Austin's a very good programmer, and what he has been able to do almost single-handedly with XP is impressive, but it's not in the same league as FSX in any number of ways. I also wonder if he'll ever really grow up and act like a mature business person, or even learn how to punctuate.Oh - one other thing - ask any developer who's tried to write something that works with XP. They'll tell you that the XP environment is constantly changing from build to build from a programming perspective - and I don't mean from v8 to v9, I mean from v9.x to v9.y. If you have everything working to your satisfaction with XP with a given version, download the latest update at your peril.Me personally, I'm going to go give Flight Gear another look; I haven't played with it in a year or so and this seems like a good time.Dave B.

Like everyone else here I'm a bit in a state of shock about ACES being shuttered. It doesn't make any sense to me if FSX was making money for MS.I really regret two things:a) that they canned it before the rendering engine was overhauled. I wish they'd rewritten it so that FSX could run very very well on current (i7) hardware.:( that we're still subjected to "what I would wish for in FS11". I can't believe that a thread was started about What FS11 Could Have Been. All some people want to talk about is the next version - were it not for the fact that payware airplanes don't run well on my theoretically pretty fast (but old) 3.4gHz P4 system, I wouldn't care much more than a whit about whatever the next version would've had. FSX rocks in most regards other than performance on affordable systems IMO.<Sigh> everywhere there's bad news, but would not've dreamed in my nightmares that one piece of that bad news was the FS product getting a stake through its heart, after such a good run...Someone PM me when there's some good news out there.Dave B.

Update: I have spent quite a few more hours in Black Shark, and I am now able to, most of the time, hit a stationary or moving ground target. I still can't believe that real world Ka-50 pilots can do all of this while trying to keep the aircraft upright, and in fact I found some information last night that indicates that IRL the Ka-50 pilot depends on other aircaft identifying and designating (via laser?) targets. In other words, the simulation is actually harder than what the real-world Black Shark pilot would have to deal with in most cases.That all said, I am still totally impressed by the fidelity of this simulation. They're doing the A-10 jet next, and if it's anything like this it will be awesome too :( .I am starting to investigate the multiplayer mode; a friend is ramping up and I hope we can fly some co-op missions soon.dos vadanya,Comrade Blave.

I started to post something here a few days ago about DCS:BS, but this forum is pretty dead. Good on ya for stepping into the void 8^).I have it - in fact I have both the Russian version and the English version, which I'm not real happy about. I bought the R version last week and the DAY AFTER THAT they released the E version, which wasn't supposed to be out until late Jan or so. Oh well, I guess it's good to support the company.All whining aside - I have spent several hours in the sim, and I can tell you that there has never been a helicopter sim (available to the public anyway) that has so much depth and detail. As I told a friend recently, it makes Longbow2 and EE-CH look like Nintendo Entertainment System games - and back in the day I was just so impressed with LB2's depth.In fact, I have to say that BS is almost too complex - and I never thought I'd hear myself say that!! Just getting the dang thing started is quite the exercise. Fortunately they provide "cheats" for startup and shutdown.I had to spend a lot of time (too much) getting my CH Products stick/throttle/pedals set up - the default assignments were completely wrong (however I'm using CH Control Manager's Mapped Mode which I think confused BS), but now that that's done it's working reasonably well. Sometimes the aircraft does things that I am not inputting, but then I won't suggest that I have more than about 50% understanding of everything that's going on yet. The autopilot and trim systems are still a bit mystifying to me. I am still getting my button and hat assignments sorted.Like almost everything else in BS, I'm still ramping up my understanding of the various systems, but if I am grokking the weapons system properly, it's a fairly manual system in that you have to slew the targeting camera around and establish a lock on a ground target. This is pretty difficult to do if you're manually flying the ship, and right now I can't imagine doing both at the same time in the heat of battle. Hopefully I'm missing something here. (Note that BS does not have air-to-air missiles, so you'll be going "guns guns" against air targets for the most part).In the end - I swear to all that is holy, if a guy could master this sim, I am certain that he could strap into a real KA-50, get it started, get it flying (assuming he knows how), and go blow a bunch of stuff up with aplomb. There are very very few systems that are not at least partially modeled. Frankly I'm surprised that Kamov (apparently) cooperated with DCS to "allow" the level of detail that is present.Note that BS does have a "Game" mode, which greatly simplifies the avionics and weapons systems (and optionally, the flight model). I recommend starting out in Game mode, rather than dive into the Simulation mode as I tried to do initially.There is supposed to be a demo out soon. The forums on the DCS site can provide you with more info should you want it, and the manuals are downloadable.cheers,Dave.