MIT - Maintenance and Income Tool

[Bjoern]

Well, it's done. It's not really thoroughly tested and probably unbalanced, but it's done.


What does MIT do?

- Tracks your flight
- Allows you to make money by hauling payload
- Wear&tear
- Repairs and checks
- Reputation
- Failures

Works with every airplane that has at least one engine. Not sure about helicopters.
Entirely written in XML for FSX, but might also work in P3D.
Requires XMLTools v2.0!


More information and the download link can be found in the manual. Read it and read it well!

Link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-HUCYi9oLjpQQGUMv29CzjDirvzOlXjep6YluTYIPMk/edit?pli=1


P.S:
Any suggestions for better default configuration values are welcome.

P.P.S:
The manual contains enough information to get you started. I did not document every intricacy of the gauge.

P.P.P.S:
More information regarding the philosophy behind the tool can be found here:
http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?94557-Addon-Maintenance-regimen

 

[stansdds]

Sounds interesting. I've considered such things before, but not willing to shell out the money, I'm cheap, don't ya know!

 

[Wingmate]

Bjoren,

It looks like it could add quite a bit to flight sim. I do have a few questions though.

How would this work with fighter aircraft more specifically naval aircraft, would the hard landings cause undue wear and tear or does it check the gear strength of specific aircraft?
Would the much higher G maneuvers in fighters also cause it to wear out much quicker than planes designed for it should?

Thanks
-Josh

 

[DaleRFU]

I think a military version would be cool. A great little tool, makes it a bit more interesting

 

[Bjoern]

The tool is pretty indifferent about what kind of airplane it is used on. For military aircraft, you can scale back the airframe stress suffered through high G loading and high throttle settings.
You can even make money with it as weapons also count as payload. There will, however, never be a dedicated "military" mode.

As far as I know, carriers are not designated as airports in FSX' GPS. In that case, revenue generating flights to carriers are not possible. Being on the deck is, however, considered being on the ground, so the non-revenue mode will work. There might be a way around that though, as it would have its uses...

Normally, you may blow a tire if you exceed a certain vertical speed at landing. I can turn said treshold into a user-configurable parameter to accomodate for "rougher" landings.

 

[Bjoern]

New release (same link).

- The landing vertical speed limit for structural or tire damage is now configurable.
- Fixed a critical bug that prevented you from doing consecutive revenue flights.
- Only wheeled undercarriages will fail in various ways. Floats, skis or skids will degrade due to airspeed or ground friction, but will never fail*.


I've checked the possibility of adding flights to ships. Conclusion: Not possible without messing with the entire flight tracking system. More complexity = more potential for bugs.

Generally, the landing spot always has to be a designated airport, airfield, airstrip or seaplane base!
So unless a carrier or ship is designated as such, you can not do revenue flights to it!


*FSX has no sensible way of implementing broken struts.

 

[ryanbatc]

So this is kinda like a standalone FSE type of thing? Or like Air Hauler?

 

[Christoph_T]

Downloading now.
I will test it in P3Dv2.5.
Thanks for posting

 

[Bjoern]

Christoph: Please report back, especially regarding XMLTools in P3D v2.5. I don't have any idea if it'll work.

So this is kinda like a standalone FSE type of thing? Or like Air Hauler?

MIT does neither feature multiplayer interactions nor a supply-and-demand based economy and is more flexible regarding the aircraft it is used in.

And thus does away with three of the biggest grievances I've had with FSE. Fly where you want, fly what you want, fly as much as you can haul.

 

[JimmyRFR]

Great work Bjoern, I'll have to give it a try once I install FSX again.

 

[SeanTK]

Missed this originally...downloading now to try out this weekend. Looks like something I may get a lot of use out of!
I'll let you know about my experience with it. Thanks for the work!

 

[Bjoern]

Thanks, Sean!

It *could* be that the failure consequences might interfere with more complex models like a lot of the russian stuff. For going from A to B, however, it will be just fine.

 

[SeanTK]

Tried it - like it - going to use it quite a bit!

Installed nearly without problems into one of my favorites, the Carenado Beech A36 Bonanza. Performed a quick flight from Discovery Bay (Olympic Field) to Orcas Island, Washington and everything performed as expected. Lost a lot of money on the flight though, and I need to tweak a few settings too, but overall it looks good.

One thing I did notice (and I still need to test my resized parameters) is that the default size of the pop-up panel was way too large, and caused much of it to be off of the screen - resulting in my needing to click and drag the window to re-proportion it so I could see everything.

May see if it works with helicopters in the near future as well, and will likely try it out on my Carenado Cessna 172 float plane too. Also, I'm wondering just how much money I would lose on a flight if I installed it on my fuel guzzlers such as the Tupolevs, my CS B-52, etc.


Easy to install and configure, yet powerful and versatile. This will be quite enjoyable, thanks!

 

[Bjoern]

Great to hear!

You could decrease the cost for fuel for a start. It's scaled to JET-A, but AVGAS is cheaper (I think).

I've added a sectrion to the documentation dealing with the equations used for revenue calculation. You can use these with a bit of pen&paper&calculator (or Excel) work to tweak the revenue and cost generation.

One thing I did notice (and I still need to test my resized parameters) is that the default size of the pop-up panel was way too large, and caused much of it to be off of the screen - resulting in my needing to click and drag the window to re-proportion it so I could see everything.

The panel.cfg parameters relating to window size will always be a mystery to me, so I just fixed the size for sake of sanity.


- Edit: HA!

[WindowXX]
background_color=0,0,0
position=8
size_mm=200,600
window_size=0.125,0.5
window_size_ratio=1.0
alpha_blend=0.8
visible=0

gauge00=MI_Tool!MI_Tool, 0,0,200,600

Try this!

 

[Bjoern]

The section dealing with revenue calculation in the documentation is now called "Tweaking Revenue". It also includes a walkthrough to adjust "(L:MIT Payload Yield Factor,number)" for a hypothetical GA aircraft on its first flight. Adjusting this parameter is the quickest and easiest way to tailor MIT to a specific aircraft.

I've also made a spreadsheet to make tinkering with projected revenue generation easier.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16eTWv_eJObEakM_DqyqRbxJj16_15gI5TBb7nrWCca4/edit?pli=1#gid=0
(Click "File -> Download As", then select the format for the spreadsheet tool you're using.)

 

[stansdds]

Great to hear!

You could decrease the cost for fuel for a start. It's scaled to JET-A, but AVGAS is cheaper (I think).

AvGas is more expensive than JetA in the U.S. At my local airport (KFCI) AvGas is currently $5.75/gal., Jet A is $4.79/gal.

 

[Bjoern]

AvGas is more expensive than JetA in the U.S. At my local airport (KFCI) AvGas is currently $5.75/gal., Jet A is $4.79/gal.

0.23 Funds per pound. Use MIT - save money.

One doesn't need to alter fuel prices. The revenue modifier will do.

 

[Bjoern]

Heads up!
Make sure that the last leg of your flight plan (the one to your destination) is activated before or after you've landed!
Otherwise, the GPS and thus MIT will never set your status to "arrived" and you won't be able to record the flight.

In case you refuse to fly with a GPS, you'll have to make sure that you've hit all the waypoints on your flight plan (check the nav log).
Or create your flight plan as "Direct To".

This is a MSFS limitatation that I can't work around.

 

[Don Quixote]

Hi,

I've finally had some time to test this tool today. First impressions: Excellent!!
Seriously, well done. I've used a couple of tools in the past which do something similar (monitoring a flight, create failures, and such). The problem with most of them - I've tried FSCaptain, Perfect flight, and a couple of others - is that they're overblown and require a lot of user input on every flight, which gets tiresome real fast. The MIT focuses on the basics and is very "lean" in its operation, which is great!

I've only made a few flights in the RV7 so far, and the MIT worked very well. I already have a question though - and two feature requests:

1) When used alongside another tool (FSEconomy in particular), which manipulates fuel and payload of the aircraft, would this interfere with MIT in any way (in non-revenue mode, that is)?

2) Would it be possible to have an option to auto-save the flight upon completion, instead of having to click the option in the menu? I know exactly that I'm going to forget clicking it all the time...

3) Could the actual landing vspeed (in fpm) be displayed alongside the rating?

Again, thank you very much for your work Bjoern!

Cheers,
Steve

 

[Bjoern]

Thanks for the praise, Steve!

1) When used alongside another tool (FSEconomy in particular), which manipulates fuel and payload of the aircraft, would this interfere with MIT in any way (in non-revenue mode, that is)?

As long as your FSE payload does not exceed your MIT payload, you can even use revenue mode. MIT does not care where the payload and fuel comes from or where it is located.

Does FSE do failures? If so, there's the only source of conflict with MIT.

2) Would it be possible to have an option to auto-save the flight upon completion, instead of having to click the option in the menu? I know exactly that I'm going to forget clicking it all the time...

It would have one or two benefits, but I want people to review everything before comitting (including landing VS). I'll give this a pass. You might just have to brush up your grey matter or stick a note to your monitor. Or fly so often as to make reviewing and clicking a habit.

3) Could the actual landing vspeed (in fpm) be displayed alongside the rating?

I knew I've missed something. Thanks for the reminder!