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The Staff of SOH
It is possible to simulate the lack of color in darkness using shaders, but I don't do that. It is usually called "HDR Lighting" and comes with some additional effects to simulate how eyes adjust for various lighting. I already (but very crudely) do this when the sun is in view.
Initially I wasn't proficient enough with shader programming to implement HDR lighting plus I wanted to avoid any dramatic changes. People might object when aircraft and ground colors they were used to for many years suddenly change to something different.
The closest you can do now is to change the first line in Light.fx from
#define GroundBrightness 1.0
to something like this
#define GroundBrightness float3(0.5, 0.5, 1.0)
Those 3 numbers are multipliers for Red, Green and Blue channel respectively. Setting them like I shown above will turn all ground and scenery textures blueish which may look more night like. Facilities and airplanes will keep their original color though.
There's also a "secret" option for d3d8.ini:
FacilityBrightness=1.0
Changing it will change the brightness of facility textures. However it is just one number and doesn't allow to alter the tint.
The +clight positioning for the ETO Lancaster cockpit is:
<Effect Type="Track" EffectName="cockpit_light_uv" PosX="-0.575" PosZ="4.25" PosY="0.95" Pitch="100" Heading="20" MinVel="-999999" MaxVel="999999"/>
<Effect Type="Track" EffectName="cockpit_light_uv" PosX="0.575" PosZ="4.25" PosY="0.95" Pitch="100" Heading="-20" MinVel="-999999" MaxVel="999999"/>
It would be helpful to see the effects section of the aircraft xdp file that is having the contrails on all the time.
There are some older versions of the contrail effect that were speed dependent.
There may also be a name conflict within the effects.xml that might be interfering.
Look at the bottom of page 24 of this thread. That's what fixed it for me.