Setting Airspeed

[dfournie]

Is it possible to write an airspeed into the appropriate offset location (TAS, IAS, Ground Speed) while FS2004 is paused, and then to unpause FS and have the aircraft at that set speed? I've been experimenting with writing into those locations, and with the velocity locations, but when I unpause FS it seems to revert back to the airspeed it was at, at the time it was paused. It seems to ignore the speeds I'm giving to it as soon as pause is released.

[ddawson]

Keep in mind that FS will continually try to "correct" the values you are writing. Your results would seem to indicate that this process continues even when the sim is paused. Try writing the required value immediately before releasing pause. If pause is to be released by the user, you will likely have to write the values on a continuous basis as long as the sim is paused.

Doug

[Pete Dowson]

Is it possible to write an airspeed into the appropriate offset location (TAS, IAS, Ground Speed) while FS2004 is paused, and then to unpause FS and have the aircraft at that set speed?

No. None of the versions of FS so far have allowed us to do thatwell not with any degree of certainty. Pausing doesn't really have any useful effect in any case.

FSX does have a facility to set the speed along with poition and orientation (and FSUIPC4 uses it to provide it as a new facility, even assuming the current position and orientation if that's what is needed), but this effectively acts like starting a flight -- you'd get a loading progress bar, for instance, so it can't be used within a flight, only as a situation starter -- good for Instructor Stations though.

In FS2004 and FS2002 you cannot influence the speed using the old FS98-compatible offsets. They are only read-outs. Writing goes nowhere. You may have more luck writing to the velocities and accelerations in the offset ranges 3060-30B8 and 3178-31D0. Those go direct into the Sim Engine. Some of those have been used successfully for things like aircraft carrier catapulting and hokk braking.

However, even those effects are likely to be temporary, as the sim engine regains control in its computation loops. You may have to repetitively write values. By all means experiment, but I'm afraid I don't hold out much hope.

If your application is for setting up training situations then take a look at the FSX offset status document (in the FSX downloads above), at offset 0558.

Regards

Pete