Thanks, Eric!
My dads name was Erik, btw.
When I was 10 we moved into a new semi detached house, built in a newly developed housing area. All houses look the same. You weren’t allowed to do any changes to your house as there were strict architectural rules about that. Anyway, the building company took forever to finish the exterior of the houses. They just finished them enough to keep the deadline for families to move in. We had a big boulder as a stepping stone (litterally) to get into the front door. Dad, being an engineer, designed a front porch, built and painted it. A few of the neighbours came asking for drawings, which he willingly shared. After a while the building company officials came by, looking a bit uncomfortable as they told dad he couldn’t just go about building his own front porch, like that. Oh, and btw, could we have those drawings as well, because we want to build porches like that on all the houses…
He planned and executed, with perfection. I guess I got some of that from him. Then I learned to just jump into any project and make it up as I go, from my older brother
Last night I flew with the Monday Night Soaring crowd–who happen to be the same people as the US Nightly Soaring crowd. (I don’t know why.) There is one difference: The MNS tasks are set up to be longer and more difficult. I actually missed the live crowd because I was unable to download the 56 gb of “Arc Alpine”* scenery in time for the task. But the task was hosted again 3 hours later, by which time installation was complete. I flew it alone but got occasional inspiration from visitors on TS. Last week I would have been perfectly gratified just to have finished. Humility is not my best trait and I really hoped to do better after gaining all my “experience”.
But I didn’t use the “Q” cheat and I flew it clean. The problem was, among other things, I kept getting lost. The PDA map is difficult to use. And it always stays focused on present position so the only way to see ahead is to zoom out which also pixelates away any useful detail.
At least I was able to recognize this as a ridge task. But with the winds light out of the NW the ridge was initially very weak. I thought I was being clever by picking this alternate valley. But I ended up get stuck with what seemed to be no options. I finally found a very narrow stretch of ridge lift and worked that for 10 minutes until I could get high enough to fly over a saddle. Downwind of the ridge, the sink was at helicopter autorotation levels. So unjust! If I had been able to read the map I would have seen that my valley joined the main valley just a few miles further east. Ugggh!
I was LOW. I tried thermaling over Innsbruck but no joy. After wasting a bunch of time just barely holding on I was able to get enough love from the ridge to make the first turnpoint and continue the ride to TP2.
TP2 (Venetbahn Bergst) was at 8000 feet. So just working the ridge wasn’t enough. We had to work back and forth to gain altitude and hit the floor for the point. And I needed the altitude because…
I got lost. Again the map thing. I followed the wrong valley and had to climb and backtrack once again to make the transition to the correct ridgline. TP3 (Zugspitze Plattf) was even higher than TP2 and the struggle to get there was similar.
Once I had TP3 made, the rest of the task was stress-free. For a good five minutes I was able to run a beautiful wave that had me doing an easy 120 knots.
The most fun part of the flight was the final glide along some massive cliff-face lift (funny how moving the hyphen totally changes the meaning.) Note my airspeed.
*As you can see, the “Arc-Alpine” is not the prettiest scenery. Few buildings. No trees. Really, its just one big 50gb ortho. Don’t judge the sim by this one. It was made by glider pilots to be functional and no more. In-game it actually looks pretty good except for the seams of patchwork from different satellite photos.
My brother’s glider club has an SG-38, and since they cannot use tow planes, only the winch, the plane indeed turns around and is then considered in the downwind leg. Nobody has ever caught a real thermal there. The record holder is a guy who actually managed to fly the whole pattern once.
But they all say it is ridiculously fun (as soon as you get over the fact that there isn’t much plane around you).
It sounds like they modeled it well in the sim then. I can only imagine how exposed you must feel strapping yourself onto that glider, and then, with your heart practically beating out of your chest, you experience the closest thing to a cat shot… I guess you get used to it after enough successful launches! (Maybe)
So, this Condor 2 is kind of relaxing, while at the same time stressful, slow paced, and yet you are always looking for the next potential source of lift, always looking for an out (it is easy to paint yourself into a corner)… I can see how this could become very addictive, and yet I haven’t scratched the surface with it yet. I just completed my first 100km ‘Task’… it took me one hour 25 minutes from launch to landing… I don’t know if I feel relaxed or exhausted! LOL.
Uggggh. So today I did the “West German” competition. I thought I was flying fast. In time alone I was lower-middle of the pack of 60 or more. But I thermalled into a penalty area (whatever THEY are–still haven’t gotten an answer). That alone cost me 600 points out of 1000. That plus some cloud penalties (despite the host saying in chat that they don’t count) put me in last place. Tonight was Norway. I got a great start and was flying in the front pack until I ran out of steam and landed out (read: “crashed”) 30km before turnpoint 3. That was a huge disappointment. This sport is very similar to aerobatics. In both, you can fly your own fantasy for years and think you’re god’s gift. But until you compete, you’re just a schmuck. (Or in my case you compete, and you’re still a schmuck–but importantly, now you know it! )
So after owning FSX for a decade, I finally tried out the soaring missions after reading this thread. Now I’m trying to figure out how to clear enough HD space for Condor2.
The base product doesn’t take up much space, and it comes with what looks like a pretty nice area to fly in. When you start adding extra scenery though…
Those videos were great. If you use VR, having all of the PDA controls setup in the HOTAS is important. Flaps too as you constantly use them in and out of thermals.
Yeah, most of us are mostly used to thinking about flaps on takeoff and landing and maybe for slow flight.
In soaring the flaps are much more widely used.
When I first read about gliders I was surprised to see that quite some of them even have things like negative flaps settings, which makes sense if you think about it, but is kind of an alien concept if you only know the “normal” flaps and their use.
So maybe a stupid question - but does the sim favor “local knowledge” with regards to ridge lift type zones and stuff like that? I’m sure in real soaring there are fields that are very conducive to thermals, and geography that locals would know provide the best areas…so does the sim sort of emulate that in some fashion?
The sim doesn’t favor local knowledge. But local knowledge really helps with the competitions because you are more aware of blind corners and the like. It’s a terrain advantage and not so much a soaring advantage. Last night’s Norway task was a good example. It was probably set up as a thermal task. But many of us were running the ridges where possible. That’s fine until you take what looks to be a valley that reconnects somehow with the course. I took a ridge but it didn’t work as well as I hoped and the “valley” proved to be a walled canyon. So I died. And I wasn’t alone. Someone who either knows the area or who has good familiarity with that scenery would not make the same mistake.
In other news, @PaulRix and I flew the ridge at Blairstown together. I thought I had loaded the task that Daniel had trained us with. But instead it was a task I setup myself with winds that were too light to work the ridges safely. We flew a good hour but both of us lost it before getting across the Delaware Water Gap and crashed. I propose, and I think he agrees, that we try to get a group going. Condor doesn’t seem to ask much of the host so I think no more than eight pilots flying off a PC is doable. Soaring lends itself to general chat and banter that may be less possible with combat.
It was a very enjoyable flight, even though I ended up breaking yet another glider. I’m getting a worse survival record than @Hangar200 Will with his beloved Viggen. . Actually, Will, as a sailor, you would probably enjoy this a lot…
Just wondering… dying in combat sims is considered ok but dying in soaring sim… is it ok also!?
At the beginning of this year I was decided to buy Condor2 as friend of mine has it and I was planning to do some virtual soaring with him. It turned out that he bought Nintendo Switch not long after the Condor and that Condor was on back burner from that moment
What I call “dying” is better called “landing out”. Saying it that way reinforces to my mind that I screwed up and shouldn’t repeat the same mistake. Interestingly, the FAA’s Glider Handbook says that landing out should not be thought of as an emergency. It is simply an inevitable part of cross country flying. This is why you can land just about anywhere and, so long as you don’t significantly break the glider, you do not report it.
Do you have VR CP?
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