avgaskoolaid

First, it's almost certain that ortho scenery for XP11 will work just fine in XP12- thats how it was with XP10 -> XP11 and LR doesn't seem to be changing the scenery system. So rest assured you will probably only have to generate the scenery once and just plop it into XP12 once it releases. As for file size, the increase is exponential with a given zoom level. It varies based on how much water is in a given area (water isn't drawn in ortho4xp so an area with many lakes and rivers will have a smaller size). ZL16 is about 2 gb per tile, ZL17 is about 8gb, and ZL18 is about 32GB. Personally, I find ZL16 for general areas I will only fly over at high levels to be completely adequate, and use ZL17 for areas around airports. You won't notice a huge difference between ZL16 and ZL17 at FL350. The tiles posted above are ZL14, except Sydney which is ZL17. So if you want to fly around Perth, Melbourne, etc you might want to generate your own but it's fine for areas you'll fly over at high altitudes. Of course, MSFS ortho scenery looks way better at lower levels. You would have to have a tile at ZL18 or 19 to match the detail shown at low levels in MSFS. Ortho4XP has more issues with color variation than MSFS, but when the colors are uniform I find that XP orhos have a more 'crisp' and realistic quality than in MSFS. One of the few areas where XP's visuals are a bit better. Regarding hard drives, it sounds like you might be familiar with linking your scenery into XPlane so you can store it on a different drive from the main sim. You can do this from as many drives as you want but sim loading times might suffer a tiny bit. 4TB is OK but if I were you I'd get a bigger HDD and just store all your custom scenery (orthos, airports and all) on one hard drive and link that into XP. I found a 20TB HDD from Seagate at Microcenter for like $300USD which is more than adequate. What issues were you having with generating ortho tiles?

As long as the cockpit door is closed (and the camera is not inside the cabin) the cabin is not loaded. So, these features do not use up any performance unless you're in the cabin looking at them. The main sources of performance hit with this plane is the SASL coding and lots of 4k textures in the cockpit. The systems and flight modeling is fantastic as expected but I can confirm a significant performance hit on my higher-end system, cabin or no cabin. I'm thinking of resizing all the textures to 4k in gimp or photoshop or something to at the very least keep it above 19.90FPS wherethe FM starts running in less than real time.

Keep in mind the realistic FMS won't be like a 747-400 or 747-8 FMS. It will be an LTN-92. It's basically a CIV-A INS with a digital screen. Very basic and primitive, just like the real plane.

It's completely different. Everything in the plane is analog- CIV-A INS navigation is standard (the default FMC is included as a 'cheat', but a more realistic early-model FMS is apparently in the works). Flight Engineer panel, steam gauges... almost nothing is the same compared to the 747-8. Even if you're familiar with the 747-400 and -8 this plane needs a lot of studying to fly from A to B at all, let alone to fly it 'properly'. If you're familiar with the 727 then maybe the transition will be easier. And that's just the aircraft itself. From a simulation standpoint the Felis -200 is way better than the SSG -8. It has much more attention to detail- it seems to be as close to the real thing as you can get in a sim, while the 747-8 has a lot of corners cut and unrealistic behavior. The SSG is really a medium-level simulation. If the Felis -200 isn't "study level", then nothing is. (I do own both aircraft btw).

No. At least, not easily. And by "not easily" I don't mean a few hours of work, I'm talking a likely months-long project. Essentially you'd need to remake the aircraft from the ground up. You may be able to use some minor elements of the systems, texturing, and modeling, but basically everything would need to be redone. I've never heard of a plane being converted from XP->P3D, only P3D->XP, but I know that in any case it isn't something to even attempt unless you're very familiar with developing addon planes. It isn't a matter of simply saving the plane as a different file format and cleaning a few minor things up. It's really akin to fitting a square peg in a round hole.

I have both (even though I don't fly helicopters too much- I guess I just hate money). The AW139 is a decent enough addon that has a good amount of detail and is fun to fly. While it clearly uses some default XP gauges/code, I still find it a faithful enough representation of the real thing to be worth its price tag. It's in beta, but I'm not expecting it to get much more than some tweaks and small improvements here and there. The 412, on the other hand, is just amazing. The way this thing handles is so incredibly addictive- I don't know what on earth X-Trident did but it feels like you're flying a solid object through the air, just like DCS helicopters (and in some cases, better). That actually makes it easier to fly than most sim helicopters because it behaves in a believable, intuitive way. Unless you have some affinity to the AW139 or strongly prefer airline/VIP flights over military/utility, the 412 is a no brainer.

Vulkan. No, but they're actively working on it. Recent updates have included various tweaks to 'get ready' for Vulkan and the dev blog has had some info on their progress. Vulkan won't make XP11 look like MSFS2020, it will modernize the sim's code to make it utilize hardware better, perhaps improve performance to some degree on some systems, perhaps give Laminar and 3rd party devs more freedom to develop better addons, and perhaps open the door for a more complete modernization of the graphics system at some point in the future. Here's an analogy, based on my uneducated opinion (not sure how accurate it is!): Vulkan is like getting new machinery and better workers in a factory. New machinery and better workers won't allow the factory to automatically make luxury goods, but it will allow them to make better versions of the goods they already make faster and more efficiently, and possibly allow the factory to diversify in the future.

The announcement has been made... it's an ATR-42-500. Interesting.... I wasn't expecting a new aircraft announcement but there you have it. I wonder if we can also expect a 72 at some point in the future. As always, initial release will be for P3D and FSX but I'm sure it'll come to XP at some point in the future. Who knows... maybe it'll get fast tracked through the development/porting process by Thranda because the ATR is so popular.

My guess is some close partnership with a manufacturer to deliver higher fidelity, officially licensed planes. No idea what that manufacturer could be- maybe Textron/Cessna? Maybe even Gulfstream? I don't think a discount or one new plane would warrant this kind of 'special announcement'.

This doesn't help you now, but have you considered using a service like privacy.com that creates virtual cards for online shopping that you can either set limits on or make single-use? Although I'd understand not using simmarket on principle after that issue, a single-use virtual card would prevent the same thing in the future. I'm sure there are similar services out there, but privacy has worked great for me and I don't think they've ever had a security breach.

The data is in [XP11 Root folder]/Custom Data/GNS430. To update this data with the navigraph data manager, you need to add an addon mapping for "X-Plane GNS430, FF757/767/777.....(a whole long list of addons)"

Weird, because I have the opposite impression of the two sims. I have both P3Dv4.4 and XP11 set up with all the different addon software and I spent a lot of time trying to get each to look as realistic as possible. I find it impossible to get P3D to look as vivid as the real world does in most situations- the whole sim just has this dingy and flat look which is impossible to get rid of without making night scenes, clouds, and lighting on aircraft completely too bright and washed out. It was better in v3, but v4 changed it for the worse IMO. P3D's lighting is great during the day in the dead of winter with clouds and snow, but not at any other time of day/time of year. XPlane, on the other hand, is not only able to get closer to real life, but it's easier (and cheaper) to do so. By default XPlane comes with some surprisingly awful sky textures that are responsible for much of the dull look. Once you switch those out for better sky textures, the overall look dramatically improves. Basically, both look dull out of the box, but XP 's lighting looks dramatically closer to real life to me in almost all circumstances. Furthermore, much of XPlane's tweaking can be done on the fly, while the sim is loaded up, so you can mess around with different settings/mods/textures and see the results in real time. With P3D, with the exception of reshade you almost always need to close and re-load the sim to make/save changes. That's just my opinion, but it's one developed after a lot of time and money spent trying to get each sim look and feel as good as possible. But, of course, I don't doubt that P3D looks sufficiently vivid to you- different monitors and monitor settings make a huge difference one way or the other along with a whole host of other factors.

It means the livery doesn't have an icon image. Select the aircraft and start the sim. Once the sim is loaded, go back to the aircraft selection menu and click 'customize' on your aircraft. At the top right corner of the window there should be a button that says 'generate icons'. Press that, and the sim will take a few minutes to generate an icon for each of the plane's liveries. You can do this at any time with any aircraft you want, even with one that already has icons.

Yep, both the Carenado and LES come with that documentation.

Thanks, I didn't know that. I've edited my post.

Glad I could help! By the way I just noticed an important and confusing typo in my post but I can't edit it anymore. What I said was: "The Carenado uses the default FMS and has a (simplified) Collins MFD, while the only non-VOR nav option in the XP is the GNS430." What I meant to say was: "The Carenado uses the default FMS and has a (simplified) Collins MFD, while the only non-VOR nav option in the LES is the GNS530." IMO the nav system Carenado went with is more user friendly, and somewhat more realistic given how many real Saabs have a Universal' FMS and Collins MFD, and I'm not sure of any airliner that uses a GNS530. This is one of the main reasons why I prefer the Carenado at the moment. EDIT: Apparently the differences are due to the different A and B models, and real Saabs have used the GNS530. I still prefer the Carenado/B model nav systems but this is important to understand.

I have both. I've owned the LES for years and picked up the Carenado as soon as it's released. A lot of people are saying "The LES is better. It's study level. Full stop", but it's much more complicated than that (and I have the feeling that a lot of the people making these comments don't even own the Carenado). So here's my rundown of it. First of all, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, all of Carenado's planes in XP are developed from the ground up (minus the model and textures) by Thranda, who has been widely praised for their Quest Kodiak turboprop and JustFlight Piper ports. They are a competent systems dev while carenado's in-house team for FSX/P3D definitely isn't. Anyway, the Carenado, having been released only a few days ago, is fully XP11.31 compatible. The LES received its last update a few versions of XP ago and might not receive a large update until v2, which will most likely be a paid update. While it works, it isn't tuned for the latest version of XP. On a similar note, keep in mind that the Carenado has been out for all of 3 days, while the LES has been out for around 5 years IIRC. Naturally, planes need a bit of time to mature with updates after release. The Carenado will eventually be available on 3 or more stores (Carenado store, org store, and justflight), while the LES has only ever been on the X-Aviation store and most likely won't be sold elsewhere. The Carenado uses the default FMS and has a (simplified) Collins MFD, while the only non-VOR nav option in the XP is the GNS430. The GNS is almost exclusively used in GA flying. Also, for the longest time it's had a bug (at least I think it's a bug) where if you delete certain waypoints, the plane will just wander off in a random direction. While the default FMS isn't a model of any real world one, it's certainly closer to the Universal FMS found in many Saabs nowadays. However, the default FMS seems to have a VNAV function that gives the SAAB some sort of autothrottle, which is unrealistic as SAABs don't have autothrottle. I still can't tell if this is a bug, and the autothrottle will be disabled/removed and the who system revised, or if this is just a consequence of the less customized engine modeling and nav system. This is the biggest negative point with the Carenado for me, but it can be avoided by simply not using VNAV. The Carenado doesn't have a 'custom' nosewheel steering system, so you're not required to turn it on before taxi and after landing like in the LES. While this is less realistic, from a usability standpoint in the sim fiddling with this is a bit annoying. I prefer not having to worry about it, but that's just personal preference. The Carenado has better modeling and texturing, inside and out. Seeing as how most pilots, you know, have eyes that they use to see things around them, this is important for immersion. The external model of the LES looks like a cartoon, but this isn't as important I suppose. The Carenado has inferior interior lighting IMO- the CRT screens and flood lights in the LES look great. However, the LES' landing lights jut out in front of it as if the plane was in clouds or fog 100% of the time regardless of actual weather conditions. This is not realistic. The Carenado has a less realistic flight model IMO. The LES feels very sturdy and heavy yet maneuverable, while the Carenado feels twitchy. Also, when on autopilot at altitude I find that the Carenado makes much more sudden movements, and goes past 30 degrees of bank in a turn (unless 1/2 bank is turned on). If this behavior isn't realistic, hopefully it'll be fixed eventually. The Carenado's engines stay very cool throughout all stages of flight, while in the LES you need to pull the throttles back, especially during climb, to avoid overheating. Both devs insist their behavior is realistic. This could be due to the fact that LES models an A model while Carenado models a B model with more advanced engines. However, the LES has more extensive custom engine modeling. It could be that their modeling is more accurate, or that it just doesn't play nicely with the latest versions of XP. I'm leaning towards the former. On the subject of engine modeling, bringing the props into reverse in the LES grinds the plane to a halt, and you need to wait over a minute for the engines to spool back up. I doubt this is realistic. The sounds of the two are a mixed bag. I like the systems sounds of the Carenado a lot more, while the engine sounds of the LES feel more authentic. The Carenado just doesn't have that characteristic rumble at low RPMs, and loud buzz at high RPM at cruise speed and altitude that I expect. But- the LES has an issue where, on approach, when you pass below a certain airspeed the engine sounds will instantly change from the normal high RPM 'in-flight' sound to the low rumble 'ground idle' sound without moving the throttles- this is only fixed by increasing speed or the position of the throttles Carenado has modeled the testing panel on their plane, while it isn't clickable in the LES. The LES has an AMAZING interactive checklist, a feature which is worth half the price of the plane honestly. Then there's the update situation. Thranda is a small team with a LOT of planes to deal with, both existing planes not yet ported to XP11 (a process that I hear is like making a whole new plane), XP11 native planes needing support, and future planes to port from both Carenado and JustFlight in addition to their own projects. As such, it usually goes that a plane will receive many updates in the first few weeks and then slow down drastically. LES, on the other hand, has one 'main' plane (the Saab), a sort of joint venture with the TBM, and a handful of WIP planes. They can thus afford to give their planes more attention. This being said, with v2 potentially being less than a year away, it's possible that v1.5 of the LES SAAB may only get cursory updates in the meantime, with major updates coming in v2. The LES has many more liveries available, but I'm quickly trying to provide as many liveries as I can for the Carenado 😉 The LES comes with a paint kit and is much easier to paint than the Carenado, so there's a possibility that the LES will always have more liveries available for it. LES has a real Saab 340 pilot with over 5000 hours in the plane giving them feedback. I don't know how many Saab pilots Thranda/Carenado have consulted, if any, and in what capacity. They may have gotten pilot feedback, they may have not, I just don;t know. Finally, I like the manipulators of the LES more. Instead of the normal clicking, you need to drag switches, and buttons have a nice 'kachunk' to them. Also, LES modeled 'pots' or 'stops' in the different prop lever positions. This allows for more precise placement of the prop levers, which is critical in this plane. So, to conclude, both have positives and negatives. The idea that this is a 'lite sim' vs 'study sim' issue, like Aerosoft vs FSLabs, just doesn't make a lot of sense to me as someone who has used both planes extensively. Both planes have very passionate and knowledgeable teams behind them. Unfortunately for the Carenado, the LES has the home-team advantage, having built up a (well deserved) reputation as the only study-level turboprop for XP, and a plane that Thranda built has the stain of the Carenado name, synonymous with 'pretty but lacking any depth', which is unfair given the standard of their recent XP11 native releases. Right now, the LES is on sale for $30 (retail is $50) while the Carenado is $40. Hopefully, this little write-up can help you understand how the two planes differ in as unbiased of a way as possible, so you can choose the best one to fit your needs. Bias disclaimer- the issues with the LES mentioned above really bother me so I've rarely flown it in the past few months. I was really looking forward to the Carenado, and it ticks all the boxes for me so it'll be my go-to Saab, at least until the LES v2 comes out. And I'm a bit of a contrarian so I like to root for the perceived underdog, and have been irritated by the denigrating of this new entry by those who don't even own both and like to hop on the hype train. Competition is essential, and I think these two are worthy competitors.

I haven't used TSS sounds in years (mainly in XP now), but at cruising speed/altitude in a jet airliner's cockpit the engines will barely be audible, if at all. The predominant sound is loud, rushing wind. The 737 has a reputation for having a very loud wind sound in the cockpit in particular. While I haven't heard the sounds you're wondering about, if you're at 30,000ft+ and mach .85 you shouldn't be hearing the engines much at all. The wind sound is supposedly much more dramatic than what you'd hear in the very first passenger rows, and even there you mainly hear wind and not the engines at cruise altitude. On youtube, there are plenty of long videos from inside the cockpits of airliners that show just how prominent the wind sound is at cruise. As you descend and slow down, the wind sound should gradually abate and by the time you're getting close to landing you should be hearing the engine sounds more prominently again.

I also use FSGRW, but I'm going to be getting AS because it has a better UI, a weather map, and the ability to halt all weather updates on approach. That and the fact that I've been thoroughly unimpressed with FSGRW's customer support makes AS worth it for me, even if the actual weather engine is identical to FSGRW's (although the weather engine itself seems to be more modern and accurate). Unfortunately, there's a lot of hype and hate around this plugin because a lot of people seem to profoundly misunderstand what it's meant to do. I even saw one guy saying 'I'm not going to buy ActiveSky because I use xvision".

It sounds like the SASL-based plugin that Carenado uses is not starting up- the window should pop up automatically. This can sometimes be caused by too many plugins being loaded into XPlane. A big culprit is the GroundTraffic plugin used by addon airports. If you have a lot of addon airports, go into the folders of a few and remove the groundtraffic plugin. Or, you can temporarily remove a few plugins from your main resources/plugins folder and see if that helps.

Sorry if I missed this in your review or on the product page, but can you actually drop/use the ordinance or is it only for cosmetic and weight/balance purposes?

Carenado planes in XPlane aren't really 100% 'Carenado' planes- the model and textures are ported over but then the systems, sounds, and flight dynamics of the plane is essentially built from the ground up by a small company called Thranda. They are actually a pretty good developer and also port Just Flight's products and make planes independently, most notably the Quest Kodiak which is regarded very well. Thranda's work on everything besides the textures and model makes Carenado's planes in XPlane far better than their P3D counterparts. For example, I bought the Beechcraft 1900D when it first came out for FSX and used it in both FSX and P3D. I could keep the throttle at 100% from takeoff to touchdown with no negative effects. As soon as I moved to XPlane I bought the XP10 version of the 1900D. I was surprised when I followed the exact same procedures as in FSX/P3D and ended up with an engine fire 5 minutes after takeoff. Turns out that the Thranda version of the planes requires you to pay attention to the engines. That said, the B1900D has some inaccuracies and isn't among the best of the best Carenado ports. Their more recent ports, such as the Citation, AeroCommander, and Dornier 228 are far better but unfortunately aren't on sale. I don't own the C208, but $18 for the B1900D is a steal and I recommend that you get it. For the regular price, it's a little expensive for what you get, but for the sale price it's a no brainer. Don't expect something like the Majestic Q400 or LES Saab 340, expect a relatively good aircraft that you can fly from point A to point B with reasonable accuracy and minimal bugs. Also, I've painted/ported over a boatload of liveries for the plane that you can find by searching my username on x-plane.org, with a few more WIP. The only thing you need to watch out for is the version of the sim the plane is made for. ONLY get the version with only 'XP11' in the title. Everything else was made for XP10 and at best includes a minor compatibility patch for an older version of XP11. Given the massive changes made to XP11 during its run you can expect flight model abnormalities or even gauges that don't work as intended. There is no discount/upgrade path for owners of the older versions to move to the new XP11 native version- you need to pay the full price.

Great shots. What sky textures/environment mods are you using?

You can use FSX Steam offline. If Steam can't establish an internet connection it will give you a popup when you try to start FSX- just select 'start in offline mode' and you should be good to go. Of course, you need an internet connection to buy and install the game, but if you happen to lose your connection the download will pick up from where it left off. Having a download version is a lot better than DVDs, which you have to worry about storing, scratching, and loosing. Also, the steam version has a couple of very minor updates from the boxed edition. That's not to mention that it seems like every boxed edition of FSX is selling for an insane price- I guess people who own it are trying to cash in by marketing it as 'vintage' or somehow special because the game hasn't been developed for over 10 years....

He'll be releasing EDDM very soon.