In article , mswlogo wrote: | | But I don't care for the selection of planes compared to RealFlight (I | fly electric and sailplanes). I know I can hunt for some free ones.
Note that RFGx generally doesn't let you make your own planes -- you have to buy them in packs.
| But what really bothers me is I wanted to get some experience with | heli's | | Well I can take most heli's go full throttle, 50 ft, cut the throttle | and let it drop and no damage. | | I'm not gonna learn to much with this thing.
I bought RFG2 and it was OK. I refused to buy RFG3 because there was no decent upgrade path, and haven't bought any of the others, but I've played with a few of them.
About AFPD, I've played with it a few minutes, and noticed the same thing you did about falling helicopters. But why would it prevent you from learning? If you know that if you do that, it'll cause damage, what's the problem? None of the simulators really accurately simulate damage anyways, though AFPD does let you break the wings off of planes if you make maneuvers that are too violent, which is kind of neat. It also lets you break the landing gear off. I guess it does better than the others.
Crash RFG3, and your plane will break in some random way, but the damage isn't generally related to the way it crashed. It's kind of neat, but it doesn't add much -- but it is fun to watch crashes take a life of their own, where the pieces bounce around and sometimes spontaneously launch themselves into the air and such. It's all very surreal.
Back to AFPD, if you hit your blades into something (like the ground), it'll crash, and that's probably the most likely crash you'll experience in real life, so it seems to me that you'll learn plenty if you actually work at it. RFG3 seemed pretty similar, and so was RFG2.
I forget which one it was, but either RFG3 or AFPD surprised me in that I smacked the tail rotor into the ground, and rather than it doing an immediate crash, the tail rotor stopped, and the heli then proceeded to behave as if the tail rotor had stopped -- which I thought was a very nice effect.
None of them seem to simulate boom strikes or anything like that.
For helis, it's FMS that you won't learn too much with. As much as I like to say good things about FMS, the helicopters are just too easy to fly. They're always in perfect trim and never do anything unexpected. You can put it in a hover, then go make a sandwich, and come back and it's still hovering.
(For planes, the same thing happens, but it's not so noticable there.)
RFG3's slope soaring mode was really good! I was quite nicely impressed. Thermal soaring, not so much -- they don't even do anything to simulate a hi-start or winch? Bah! And it wasn't really clear how I'd ever find a thermal. AFPD seemed a lot better at doing thermal soaring.
All of the modern simulators seem to have a display that will tell you your altitude and such. It would be nice if they could give you an audible vario like the glider pilots use (both R/C and full scale), but so far as far as I know nobody does. AFPD gives you a total energy vario, which is neat, but it's visual only.
I have not tried Reflex XTR.
| Also the Dummy Controller is total junk and I asked if ikarus would | take it back for refund and they said no. They would replace it, but I | didn't want another one. And trim if for beans and trim is different | for rudder depending on throttle position. It's really junk.
Don't recall anything out of the ordinary with the controller, but then again I didn't spend much time on it.