ORIGINAL: da Rock
ORIGINAL: Steve Campbell
BTW... do any of the four expansion packs feature the H9 P-51 PTS? That's what the kid will actually be flying...
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Unfortunately it appears that most of the sims are somewhat biased in the list of models they offer. The producers of the most popular ones have affiliations and the models they offer for the most part follow those affiliations. For example, the H9 PTS model is one you'll probably not see in any other sim than one with a Hangar9 affiliation. That would be in FSOne. I don't believe it's in the initial release of that one however. It does offer a H9 150 P51, however.
OK, I took a moment and did a Google search and found a site that is selling the FSOne addon for $40 and actually listed the 10 models that come in the addon (I couldn't find any mention of the addon on the HorizonHobby site. Must not have used the right search words.). The FSOne addon has that PTS in it.
As for Great Planes Real Flight offering it, nope.
All good stuff here. DaRock nails it with the comment that there are no philanthropic sim designers out there that would not have a slant to a particular brand. I fly more E- Flite models, yet I have found RealFlight to be the one sim I prefer at the moment. I think FS1 looks great and in time should be deeper. If I want to fly something like my Mini-Ultra Stick, I can go to the KnifeEdge swap pages and find a similar plane.
Some people don't like the landing or lack of flight realism in the sims, but I think those posters may have not gone in and changed wind speed, direction, gusts, and other elements that would make the experience more realistic. I crank up wind speeds to about 10 mph more than what I fly in. I change gusts and turbulence and wind direction frequently. By time I have monkeyed around with the settings it is less than a picnic to fly in, but when I am able to smoothly react to those settings and deal with cross wind landings it does what the simulator should do for practicing pilots. Have your kid hit the F key while you are flying to create a flight failure. My 10 year old and I beat each other up on that a lot and they think it is hilarious when dad can't handle a reversed elevator servo
When any of these start seeming like you are flying on rails, shake it up a bit and make it a little more realistic. I know that I regularly take a RCU Bipe foamy plane and fly it around in my northern OH back yard in winds others wouldn't bring out other planes in. It is a blast and makes a calm day all the better. You can get real good by practicing this stuff on the sim, even though it is not the same as flying.
Having the zoom (Z) key set up is also a good idea. keep the ground in view for take offs and landing, hit Z and have it set up for more or less closeness for aerial maneuvers to practice, and hit it again to reorient when the plane turns to a dot. That also helps .
I was hesitating on G4as I have very little issues with the G3.5. Lots of swap planes on the way from the knife edge site being written for G4 and you essentially get expansion pack 1 when you buy it. I have all the G3 add ons and will put that on the laptop for use with the family and during boring conference calls
either sim you get is fine, do yourself a favor and screw with the climate settings to make it the educational tool it was designed for, otherwise you get what another poster stated, "perfect engine, perfect trim, no wind, and unrealistic landings"
Thanks for the discussion and research comments to help me consider the upgrade