Intrepid On Real Flight Sim

[Brady Longmore]

I was in the local hobby shop the other day, and noticed they had out a computer with Real Flight Sim running on it. I found that they had the expansion pack on there, and found the Bergen Intrepid. I have to say that they did a fairly good job. It really felt very simular to the real thing.

I have a question though. I don't have a simulator that allows to practice auto rotations, so I thought I'd try some for the first time on Real Flight with the Intrepid. It really wasn't too hard at all. I actually found it to be quite easy and actually fun.

To those of you who have done it for real, and on the Real Flight sim, my question is: Is it really that easy to do? Does it feel like that? Seeing how otherwise it felt pretty realistic in regular flight, is that realistic with an auto rotation???

[cbergen]

Thank you!! :D

I did model that after my own bird, Mal modeled the 90 after her helicopter.

For some real fun doing auto's, go to the cliff field, create a heavy updraft, launch your heli into it and kill the motor. You can auto all day long.

I have heard that G3.5 has a slight bug in the auto "feel", that it may be too "easy", but the truth is, it does teach you the control movements, teaches your fingers the timing necessary when you want to flare and land the heli.

Real auto's are not that difficult and actually are a lot of fun. The first time you do a real one, you'll go up and do 10 more just like it!!

[MarkWebber]

I've thought that the auto felt very similar to the real thing. I've even changed the mass and cg to mimic the camera mount installed and I'd say that contributed greatly to my one forced landing.

I would avoid cheating, however. If you don't have a driven tail, you should turn that off in the edit menu. No sence practicing what you don't fly.

[Brady Longmore]

What do you mean by "driven tail"?

[MarkWebber]

The tail rotor is driven during autos if you have the proper crown gear. If you practice autos with a driven tail in the sim and then try to do an auto on your undriven tail you might be in for a suprise. With an undriven tail, to maintain heading you need to have forward speed. Airflow across the tail keeps it going where you want.

Like Chris said, you can go to the sloap soaring field and fly in auto for a very long time. If you change the tail configuration to undriven, this is a good place to practice flying without tail control. Helps you get a feel for the lag in getting the tail to come around.

[Brady Longmore]

OK.

Yeah, I went to the sloap and couldn't figure out why the heli felt so strange to control. Now I understand. I will have to try all this next time I am at the hobby shop. Too bad Real Flight isn't compatible with Mac. :arggg:

[MarkWebber]

Once you get used to it, the heli does handle well provided you don't try to turn too quickly.

[Helisin]

I heard Mac had a windows beta version on the Mac sight(free) that you could download. No warranty thats all. On start-up it gives you the option to run Mac os or windows. Choose windows and then you can run the flight sim program. This is just 2nd hand info from reading other Mac users forum comments claiming they have sucesfully operated sim programs this way. Can't remember which sim. I've been wanting to get a Mac but have held off for this reason.

Food for thought!

Rob.

[Brady Longmore]

yes, it's true about Macs being able to run Windows now. It was a great break through for Mac, since that has been an issue that turns a lot of potential buyers away. However, I believe that you have to have a newer Mac with the new Pentium processor to do that. Mine's about six years old now. I have been thinking of getting a new Mac for my AP business when it gets going. Needs to get going first though. :D

[billf]

If you have the older power pc chip you will need Virtual PC to run windows I have not tried the sim on my older pp chip yet as I have the new intel chip and use paralells.

[PaulH]

What Rob is talking about is a beta product named Boot Camp (http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/). It has supported XP for a while, but with the revision released a couple of days ago it also supports Vista.

The only problem is that it requires the hard drive to be partitioned. If you're like me and have a pretty full hard drive, this isn't possible. I found these instructions (http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176) (not for the non-technical) that details how to modify a windows xp installation CD so that it can target an external USB hard drive as the target of the install.

Now all I have to do is get more memory and an external hard drive, and I'm all set! :mrgreen:

[Brady Longmore]

might just be worth it to get a laptop from Dell with the bare min. requirements to run Real Flight. Then have a super Mac for video and photo production.

[PaulH]

Brady,

Why buy two computers? You can't really use them both at the same time anyway, so just reboot the Mac into Windows XP when you want to use RealFlight. Pool your money into one kick-ass Mac and you won't need a new computer for a very long time. :)