zinfinion

It's in amongst the oil gauges. I had no idea until just now.

Stearman and Maule, yes. RV, no. Unless I am oblivious to something here.

Just a note that WOT/LoP only applies to cruising above 8000' where you can never get more than 75% power anyways. At lower cruise altitudes the WOT no longer applies and you need to throttle back to 75% or less power (which you need the engine power curve charts to fully determine). The quick and dirty method is to add manifold pressure + (RPM/100) and then run that against known values (again derived from those pesky charts). The Maule's Lycoming IO-540-V hits 75% around a sum 48. If you're cruising down low (clandestine!) set RPM to 2200 and throttle back to 26". Then lean from there. I tend to aim for 10 lbs/hr flow rate LoP, since the book suggests 12, which is RoP. With regards to the Cub, it is only allowed to use the full 180HP for 5 minutes after takeoff due to FAA regs for the class. After that it cant be operated above 80 HP, hence the altitude/RPM placard on the dash. As long as you stick to the printed values, you'll never exceed 80HP. With regards to mix, you should see the RPM's spike a bit while leaning if MS gets it right since it is a fixed pitch prop. And for some truly quick and dirty numbers, 100% throttle, 60-70% prop, and 35-40% mix is a good starting point for 8000'+ cruising. Maule or RV-6. And one other thing: Takeoff climb should always be balls to the wall throttle/prop/mix to keep the engine cool while running full out. Unless above 3000', then lean to max RPM before taking off. And yes, I have been waiting for an excuse to say balls to the wall. I'll leave the rest of the explaining to the articles linked.

Ah, jobs, yes. I thought I was being completely oblivious to there being actual Maule specific missions (not challenges or jobs). I do want to see proper missions released for Alaska (Cub + other planes), whether with the Cub Cockpit or in a separate missions pack. More Search and Rescue, Photo Books, Fly-ins, other new stuff.

Doubly true when using weather themes. Going above 7000' in Low and Threatening gets rather dicey around mountains. I did a similar flight from Seward to Elmendorf AFB. I accidentally landed at Merrill though. :P

The Maule came with missions? Or am I reading this entirely wrong?

Flight team really needs to add a HUD clutter toggle button. So many great shots sullied.

If the cockpit is $7, not annoyed. If the cockpit is $15, somewhat annoyed.

I'm thinking that might be Ketchikan. Seward is pretty awesome as well when you first find it after going through some great looking mountain passes.

I'm so ready to throw money at my screen. :lol:

I'm very impressed by the default AA. So impressed that I've not tried to better it through tweaking.

I think the bug is me. As long as I take it slow, no odd behavior. Can anyone trying rapidly zooming in and out, as well as panning across large areas? And switching between terrain and earth view frequently? This might confirm it is just a case of me outpacing the program.

Is Plan-G acting buggy for anyone else? It keeps getting stuck on one zoom level, and when panning it will snap back to where it got stuck. Which is making it pretty much impossible to use... Any ideas?

PANC's lights put PHNL to shame. :D Unlit airports give me the heebie jeebies.

Have you tried SkyVector?

Clandestines right before dawn, low and threatening or heavy weather. I did heavy for the first time this morning Lanai to Dillingham, got bounced about pretty good en route to Honolulu. The whole bay was fogged in to 1000', so until I got inland a bit it was soup all the way. Crossed over to the north shore, and Dillingham was fogged in as well, which made for a bit of a tense approach and landing. Other than clandestines I run a few hours after/before sunrise/sunset facing the sun. I'm not too keen on how jagged and flickery the shadows in the cockpit are, especially the RV-6A. If those got smoothed out that'd be a big plus. As far as seasons, I've not flown much in Alaska yet, but this mornings flight in summer was gorgeous, probably because I strayed into the Kenai Fjords National Park to check out the Harding Ice Field. AK01 Alaska Airpark to PAWD Seward made for a fun burger run.

I'm aware of the differences. I should have said VOR-esque portion. Annoyance still applies. :lol:

What annoys me more than DME only installations are TACANs, because you know the VOR portion is there, but you aren't allowed to use it. That and you have to flip to the channel/frequency lookup table in the AF/D.

If Steam is down it will say NO CONNECTION at the bottom of the Steam window. I just got logged in offline in Flight and it showed the ICON at the main menu so I closed Flight before it could possibly do anything to my profile. So to answer the question, Live is down, Steam is up. Update: Backed up my Flight folder to be safe, opened Flight again in offline mode, and clicked Play. Everything is safe and secure, nothing went bonkers. The only difference is all the warbirds I haven't purchased do not show in the hanger. And when hovering over the offline icon to the bottom left the popup says that planes are not available to purchase. Obviously.

I'm aware of the reflection bug. Unfortunately Stone didn't expand on what the bug actually is. I'm presuming it's the occasional full screen flash, as well as the reflections momentarily blinking out of existence. The mountain reflections in the wide rivers in Alaska are too good looking to pass up though. I've done this by accident a few times when I had FXAA on in the control panel. While it didn't cause any slow down, I didn't really see any benefit from it either. That said, I haven't tested it out with lower in game AA settings, so there might be something there. I noticed the same. I've left in-game V-sync off and am using Adaptive in the control panel. On the very rare occasion I dip below 60FPS, I'd rather have tearing than a fixed 30FPS.

Here are some quick shots of what Flight looks like with the settings I'm recommending in the far right column. You can see terrain reflecting in both of the mountain pass shots.

SceneryQuality=HIGH sets ReflectionQuality=LOW. SceneryQuality=MAXIMUM sets ReflectionQuality=MAX. J's shots are using the ingame presets. I'm suggesting you set ReflectionQuality=HIGH in Flight.cfg and ignore the presets.

I briefly tried Nvidia's FXAA, but it was far worse than in-game AA. I've not tried any sort of MSAA. I do however force 16x anisotropic filtering, it makes a big difference on the ground and on approach. @J van E: Thanks for clearing up my lack of verbosity. HIGH has water reflecting sun, clouds, and terrain. I honestly can't tell the difference between HIGH and MAX, but HIGH runs much better. On MEDIUM you lose terrain reflections, but keep the rest.

As sim-like as feasible. Controls: TrackIR - still tuning this, but it's amazing, plus it frees up the hat on the joystick. Thrustmaster T.Flight HOTAS X - most affordable HOTAS around, plus it's quality. Also, the rudder on the throttle is so much better than stick twist. I really do need to get proper pedals though. Settings: Assists on brakes and prop effects enabled (no analog braking on a stick, and not enough fine tuning to counter prop effects at the moment). HUD and POI disabled. Makes takeoff and landing with wind a bit challenging, but it beats all that visual clutter. For flying, I'll find a job I like, alt-tab out to Skyvector, lay out a quick path, note VOR's when possible and then scribble it all down. I'll then check the AF/D and TPP for the destination airport and add any notes about that. And then I'll flip to the airport diagram for my origin airport to figure out the taxiways (no skipping, taxiing is half the challenge). On landing I'll do the same for the destination airport, especially if it's a confusing place like Honolulu.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=xKRsCpx4 It's fairly self-explanatory. The right hand column lists the settings I am using since needing to tweak Flight for Alaska's more demanding locale. It looks almost as good as all max settings, but runs much smoother. Before editing your Flight.cfg, back up both %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Flight and %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Flight to be on the safe side. To edit Flight.cfg go to %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Flight and open Flight.cfg in your text editor of choice. Make sure to set Custom=1. Changes can be made while Flight is running. Pause Flight (ESC), Alt-Tab out of Flight, make changes, save, Alt-Tab back to Flight. My recommended settings should be a good starting point. Autogen would probably be the first thing to lower to gain more performance. Good places to test are Honolulu, Anchorage, and Bear Creek. Set conditions to sunset or sunrise with weather to truly test your settings.