lzamm

Sorry, double post.

I tend to agree with this sentiment. I'm not too sure of the direction MS is taking with the level of detail it is putting in default aircraft. In the past that has been the realm of third-party add-ons, and in my opinion it should stay that way. Not that I'm complaining, mind you :).

I wonder how much Microsoft put up for its side of of the contract. To me, it sounds very much like take the money now and worry about the penalties later. But best of luck to them. It may not be impossible, but it certainly isn't easy.

I don't fly GA on MSFS much (and when I do, rarely above 3000ft) but if it's anything like FSX, and I suspect it is, leaning to the correct mixture actually increases the power (RPM on fixed prop, MP on constant speed). So just (incorrectly) lean for max power.

For the record, the latest on this is that installing the SU12 update has fixed the issue. Thanks to those who contributed suggestions.

It's called terminal velocity. After falling a certain distance (dependent on the weight and drag coefficient), drag equals weight and a falling object stops accelerating. Beyond that point it doesn't matter how long the fall is as the speed remains the same. Cats know this.

So after 2 years of faultless operation my trust in the MSFS store version has been betrayed by a requester coming up after the "signing in" and "checking for updates" phases, saying "Something went wrong launching your game - Error code: (0x80004005)" and the program exiting. Interestingly in the xbox app the program shows up with a frown-face icon instead of the play button. Did all the stuff I read about, such as updating xbox/store, logging out an in again, repairing the app and dism/sfc. Still the same. However the program runs fine if run as an administrator, I didn't even lose my settings. So it's clearly a permissions issue and all the files are still there and intact. However I'm not keen on running as admin, particularly if an update has to be installed (what permissions will the new files have?) Anyone seen this before and/or have any suggestions? If not I'm probably up for a reinstall before SU12 drops (I'm not on the beta).

This won't be much help if the Microsoft servers are the bottleneck. Microsoft has millions of customers and I'd be surprised if those who pay for a service don't get priority over us freeloaders. I get very patchy results here (southern Europe). Places I visit for the first time are sometimes fine on the first run and sometimes take several minutes to load through. The cache definitely works, though. Eventually even London ends up looking pretty good.

Yes. The specific heat of water is much higher than that of air, and so will rise in temperature much less (mass for mass, and even more so volume for volume) when carrying the same amount of heat. Heat flow is driven by temperature difference and the air quickly warms up as it travels along the fins, reducing the effectiveness of the heat transfer and requiring multiple, very large fins. Compare the frontal area of a Spitfire with the liquid-cooled Merlin (radiators and all) with that of an equivalent air-cooled radial-engined fighter such as the Wildcat. The responsiveness of water-cooled systems to changes in heat production is also superior to air-cooling because of the thermal capacity of the liquid. Thermal conductivity has very little to do with it as the flow over the fins is turbulent, which distributes the heat much more effectively than conduction. Both air and liquid cooling can be made equally efficient and effective, and the choice is mostly dictated by the application. Liquid cooling has the advantage of small size while air cooling is cheaper, simpler and potentially more reliable. The main advantage of liquid cooling for computers, in my opinion, is that you don't hang a couple of pounds of metal on the motherboard, and the heat can be dumped outside the case rather than warming up your RAM and SSD's.

I totally abhor GA glass cockpits in the sim but thought I'd have a look at the King Air after reading your post. If anything that experience confirmed my opinion. However after a few minutes of frantic button-pushing on the downwind I sussed it out and the plane made a faultless ils intercept and approach. So I think I know what happened to you - apologies in advance if I'm wrong and you already know all this. So, to tune the Nav receiver, as you probably know you SPLIT one of the screens, click the bottom tab to get to the menu, then click on NAV1 to get to the tuning screen (see why I hate 'em?). The gotcha here is that this is the STANDBY frequency not the ACTIVE one, so the frequency you see there is not the one being tuned. You have to click XFER to make that frequency active, and then the display will show what was previously the active frequency and is now the standby. I haven't read the manual, but I couldn't find a way to display the active frequency except by XFER-ing it back to standby. You should in any case always verify you're really tuned to and receiving a navaid before engaging the autopilot to it, the traditional way is to enable the audio and listen to the Morse identifier. The glass-cockpit alternative is to go to the PFD setup page - where you select the CDI Source - and set a bearing pointer to NAV1. Besides giving you a pointer (which I don't think it should for a localiser), there's also a little tab near the HSI with the station identifier and the distance to it. The Bearing Pointer selector, as well as the CDI Source selector, automatically show VOR or LOC depending on the station tuned - if yours was showing VOR you certainly weren't tuned to what you think you were!

Can we put the A380 at the other end of the list? Still the most comfortable plane I've had the misfortune to have to spend most of a day on, and that includes the 747 upper deck. Of course, Emirates may have had a hand in that.

It is a bit of over-sell, I think. All you get to see from the UK is a 747 take-off, nice enough as it is but hardly a "rocket launch" such as a shuttle or a falcon. Apparently 2nd stage failure (or should that be 3rd stage if the 747 is the first stage?) Nothing wrong with the "launch" itself.

Well, the company exists but their website contains only a lot of tree-hugger buzz-words and no hard facts. No numbers, no mention of battery chemistry. And an internet search didn't turn up anything more detailed either. They require your email address just so you can see a data sheet, and $100 plus shipping for an evaluation sample. Quite a way to promote a world-changing innovation, isn't it?

Not saying it's deliberate 🙂 but autopilots of that period weren't much good for changing attitude or, for that matter, heading. The aircraft had to be piloted into the correct attitude before engaging the autopilot.

"Flight" is Asobo-speak for a beta program. Really bad choice of words in a flight simulator. People have in the past had problems at the end of a beta, on the ms store version, but reading people's posts it seems to have been sorted. Having said that I don't participate, myself.