On Wednesday, 13 April 2005 04:35, Ampere K. Hardraade wrote: > On April 12, 2005 07:48 pm, Paul Surgeon wrote: > > A soaring simulator is just too "specific" and FG tends to be a general > > purpose, powered flight simulator. > > I disagree. > > Adding such thing as thermals into FlightGear will only add to the > realisim. Just because thermals are used by gliders, that doesn't mean > other aircrafts such as commercial airliners won't get affected by > thermals. > > Ampere
Maybe you didn't understand what I meant. I meant FG only really caters for powered flight at present - it does a terrible job as a sailplane simulator at the moment. I don't disagree with the fact that thermals affect other aircraft but where are the winch launches, aerotows, ridge lift, wave lift, final glide computers, GPS units, competition functionality, etc? Most of these features are specific to sailplanes. Anyway the thermals in FG are not realistic at all. 1. They are not generated based on the actual terrain and azimuth of the sun 2. They have no clouds attached to them (the primary means of identifying the possiblity of thermals in real life) 3. They don't lean with the wind 4. They don't weaken smoothly near the cloud base 5. They don't have areas of sink around the outside 6. They don't have strong lift at the center with less towards the edges 7. They don't decay and end up being sources of sink as the Cu turns into a thunderstorm If we model water in FG it doesn't suddenly make it a great submarine simulator. Paul _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-users 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
