Sydney Hoeltzli schrieb:
OK, your patience please. I'm a very novice simmer.
I'm a pilot trying to clean more rust off her instrument
skills than I have flight time for, since the birth of my
daughter.
I'm trying to use MSFS '98 to fly instrument approaches.
My husband has it configured with CH products yoke and rudder
pedals.
I've been flying a Grumman Cheetah someone else modeled and
I found on the net, since IRL I fly a Grumman Tiger and it's
nice to have the power settings etc etc be fairly close to real
life.
The questions.
1)
Allowing for my sim inexperience, the aerodynamic behavior
appears to suck great big rocks. My hat is off to people who
have hundreds of hours flying instrument approaches in MSFS
to 2/20 standards.
In particular, the pitch axis is way too twitchy. A small
yoke movement will produce 1000 ft rate on the VSI without
large airspeed excursions. IRL, such a rate requires 1)
a larger yoke movement 2) the airspeed will be winding up
(or down) fast.
I thought it might just be the plane, but I tried the stock
C182 and it was the same where IRL "way haul away" is the
yoke MO in a C182. I tape my wrists when I'm flying one at
forward CG.
Are there any settings I'm missing which could "tweak" this?
Any advice about setting the yoke controls to minimize this?
Go into the setings and reduce the elevator sensitivity.
2)
We are missing many local airports from our database (St. Louis
area). The big Class D and B airports are there, but the smaller
GA airports aren't. Is there a freeware or shareware source for
smaller airports for FS '98
You might look at one of the sites like
www.avsim.com for freeware
scenery for FS98, or just Google FS98 Scenery GA.
3)
I would like to look at my ground track and flight profile to
see how it compares to the track of the instrument approach.
I found the "flight analysis" "course tracking", which is a
start. But is there a way to scan back along the course? Or
to compare it to a specified ground track? Is there a freeware
or shareware product which will do this? (ie allow one to specify
a flight path or procedure to be flown, then compare what was flown)?
Or at least to display ground-based navaids and features (like runway)
at a map height which will allow a decent amount of the track to be
displayed?
I heard mention of a product called "Nav" by Tim Wright, will this
do it? If so what version do we want for FS '98 and where do we
obtain it?
I used Nav (by Ted Wright) to display the navaids in FS98, and design
flightplans. A great piece of freeware.
The FS98 handbook gives you no idea how many navaids are really there.
4) Slewing. Often where I want to be is a couple miles from a
ground-based navaid which I can specify easily as a lat-long.
But when I type "y" for slewing, the plane just spins around and
around. Doesn't seem to respond to keyboard controls specified
for slewing in different directions. Anyone else have this problem
and what's the cure?
I've seen this happen. Most likely your joystick/yoke controls are
mapped as inputs to slew mode.
Go into your FS98 settings and make sure there are no joystick/yoke
settings for slew mode.
Tom
Basically one thing all these questions might amount to is, should
we upgrade? We skipped FS 2000 because we heard it was such a
system hog. We have a pretty fast, large-memory system now, we
just haven't bothered to upgrade.
Should we invest in a newer sim and if so, which one? I'd
like:
1) realistic flight modeling of a small GA plane, preferably
a 4-place Grumman
2) a reasonably realistic and easy to set instrument panel
(ie I want to be able to set radios while I'm flying, it's
part of what I need to practice, not switch to a different
view which blocks the instruments)
3) decent wind modeling
4) a good database of airports and navaids
5) the ability to analyse my ground track and flight profile
after the flight.
I could care less about "eye candy" scenery or flying fancy planes
right now. But, I don't want to pay hundreds of bucks for an IFR
sim which doesn't model a plane of similar performance and settings
to mine and no chance of a shareware or freeware model, either.
And I gotta admit, the spouse is more into "eye candy" and fancy
planes when he has time to sit down at the sim.
The eye candy is a major factor with FS2002. Make sure your machine is
up to it- at least 256kbytes, 800 MHz, and a 3d graphics card. Otherwise
stick with FS98.
Tom
We could upgrade to MSFS 2002 or 2004 but I'd hate to do it if it
would mean more airports and better scenery, but the same flight
model inaccuracies. The VSI (pitch excursion) aspect of the flight
modeling in particular is driving me fairly wild.
Thanks for any help,
Sydney