• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

A Flight Simulation Tale

.....Mulligatawney O'Dongle would go down in history as the one responsible for the 50 ft tsunami now racing towards Key West. He dismissed the thought, there was still his cunning plan. He removed the tattered remnants of his wet suit and donned his spare this time checking the relief valve. He knew that the framerates everyone were seeking lay 100 ft down in a flight recorder on the sea bed. If he could only...........
 
...give himself some ballast to descend those 100 ft. He suddenly remembered he had a 1 cwt sack of sprouts in his pocket and he could tie them to his toes and descend in vegetarian style into the ocean depths to gather the framerates. Oh Lawdy, this is so easy, to fool the Indrepet Aviateur, he thought, and become wealthy beyond all the calculations of the village Elders. Once he had sold on the framerates he would buy a bicycle and parade up an' down the dusty street until the tyres wore out. HA HA he gurgled. His eyes crisscrossed crazily and he failed to spot the dark shape......
 
...of the Great Pink following him down. As he decended through 90ft he could see the black box below. It was almost within his reach when the Great Pink attacked. Missing his legs it severed the rope attached to the sack of sprouts. Relieved of the ballast he rose upwards, the gas within his suit compressed at 90 ft, rapidly expanded inflating his suit like a barrage balloon increasing his rate of ascent. He broke surface like a Polaris missile just as his dongle patch pierced the suit. With a loud "Pharrrrrrp" he rose towards the stratosphere executing two perfect loops until with a feeble " Phweeeee" from the suit he reached the apex of his trajectory.....
 
What? Will nobody save Mully? Has Intrepid Aviator retired to his pipe, carpet slippers and wing chair. And what of Gaylord and Aunt Martha. Did the 6 gimbal refrigerator get turned into a Ferrari?

To be continued ???
 
The Next Chapter (i lost count).....

...After 16 days of rest.... (the last post was Oct 3... are we letting this end)... He streched his arms, kick his legs, cracked all bones in his body, and gathered all his materials one more time, and cranked his FS. He prepared a liter of drink by his side :icon29:, turned off his phone, he doesn't want to be bothered a bit... He isolated himself from the world, he want to focus on his projects....


To his amazement......
 
HJCAP748.jpg



...he found that many of the flightsim addons he had thought of, actually existed already! courtesy of the wonderful group of people who made these things work, from all over the world. All you had to do, was to know where to look.

Now this time he was going to take great care...
 
....to look after the suitcase, and he intended to stay in the bath until he was sure it was safe to come out. Even in the dark. Later on he would return the shark suit to the Merry Fish-Suit Rental Company and then he thought he might get back in the bath and take a few more puffs and slug back some of the Pope's special drink while he thought how to spend his time (and money) building the new generation of computers his mind's eye told him were about to be created by someone with real flair and super clean toesies....ah, yes, he......
 
lemonadedrinker said:
....to look after the suitcase, and he intended to stay in the bath until he was sure it was safe to come out. Even in the dark. Later on he would return the shark suit to the Merry Fish-Suit Rental Company and then he thought he might get back in the bath and take a few more puffs and slug back some of the Pope's special drink while he thought how to spend his time (and money) building the new generation of computers his mind's eye told him were about to be created by someone with real flair and super clean toesies....ah, yes, he......
Click to expand...


... and of course celebrate his 63rd birthday which is today... :birthday2.... opened a bottle of champagne... and...






(happy birthday lemonade drinker)
 
... it was safe to come out of the bath... and the celebration is over, he felt so refreshed .... :engel016:

He quickly jumped out of the bath, dried himself, ready to start A NEW day on Flight Simulation 2004

The many addons - aircrafts and sceneries - loaded in his system- he remembered... He has to FOCUS on this.... and....:running:
 
...actually set up that flight he had promised himself all those years ago.
All these distractions of system tweaking, addons, hardware upgrades etc would now be pushed into the background for the task ahead.

It was going to be properly planned: the aircraft, the time period, fuel planning, weather, everything to make it as Real as It Gets.
He would start...
 
wondered why Google Earth showed Portmarnock on the East coast of Ireland!
Jim would not have added 150 miles to the journey unnecessarily, he was a Scot after all.
The other small matter was that the trip required some extra fuel.
FS models don't allow more than 100%, so this would have to be made up in baggage weight.
Taking out his circular aeronautical slide rule, he calculated that to make up the requisite 162 gallons of fuel would require an extra 109 gals over nominal 100%, and that translated into 654 lbs, so TOW would be 357 lbs over the permitted max of 2050!
Wow, this was going to test his airmanship.
And then there was the small matter of where Jim was when he went missing between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick?
Before taking off on this journey, he was going to have to...
 
do some in-depth preparation!
As a first stab, he took a look at a Great Circle route.
Although not quite what Jim did, this was as close as MSFS was going to get to the (almost) rhumb-line course flown, which went a little north of track.
Also, there being no suitable sim airfield on the Irish west coast, Inishmaan was going to be the stand-in.

HJCAP761.jpg


Next, how did this compute in the sim?

HJCAP752.jpg


Not too bad, and in the same ballpark as the actual flight.
This was going to be a game of small compromises to make it work.
So far, so good, then...
 
Just one small problem...
Was there a repaint for G-ABXY???
One could not really stretch that point, as otherwise there could be no screenshots!
 
...A problem fortunately rather quickly resolved with the timeous update of the Puss Moth with some black wheels and a rather smart specular exhaust!
 
...yes indeed....the Gudermann principle could apply here, with reservations, he thought, but as he stood facing the warm wet wind on the Inishmaan runway, I wondered how he managed to sort out the initial angle of departure to obtain the Great Circle Route shown on the map. In those far off days, with that wet wind whipping round his long heavy coat and the rain dripping into his shoes, there was no GPS to give us the answer in the pink line format we take for granted today.

Was he guided by radio signals from Ireland to help him out over the wild North Atlantic to a point far enough towards America to allow him to guess his way forward towards the right part of the continent until he recieved radio signals coming at him and could follow them correcting himself as he flew?

Perhaps, once over land again, he became completely disorientated as he tried to find the radio signal he needed. Maybe he landed and slept for some time in Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, before setting off again......
 
but our illustrious 'simviator' still pondered Portmarnock Strand, which an extensive bit of Googling found really is on the east coast of Eire,a mere puss moth's backfire from Dublin's fair city....exactly what had prompted Jim to add over 150 miles to the crossing unnecessarily......
 
I think I've become completely disorientated, as Wikipedia shows that both Kingsford Smith and Jim started their flights from the Strand at Portmarnock (outside Dublin), one to go to Australia and the other to America. He may have been Scottish, but if the fuel was sponsored, perhaps he wasn't too bothered about the extra 150 miles. It also means that if there were to be an aircraft problem he had a couple of hours to diagnose it over dry land. So much for the poetry of Inishmaan! Perhaps the map shows he landed at Inishmaan before starting the flight proper?

Andy.

i rather liked the idea of the rain dripping into his shoes.
 
Orient, yes, thought our intrepid Aviator, maybe I should follow the route of Mrs Mollison, and go east..to Tokyo from Lympne in Jason II, time to...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top