Smurf

A2A B-17 with all the weathered cockpit textures and the full noise sound mod wav file that makes my coffee mug dance while rolling down the runway. Never get tired of that, couldn't do without it!

Peter Besenyei, Hungarian aerobatics champion and inventor and founder of the Red Bull Air Race. Can't say I know him but I met him at the 2006 Perth air race and we had a little chat. He hasn't the best run of late in the air race but he's still my hero.

For me it's by far the most amazing aircraft in FSX and now P3D. It's an extremely thorough and complete sim without all the pointless stuff like, dare I say it.... fasten seat belt and no smoking light switches. It's one of a very few aircraft that I've bothered to learn the ins and outs of from start to finish and when you know that stuff, the feedback you get from it and how you interact with the variables that come with each flight is a very rewarding experience. There are some cockpit textures available for it that give it a real scratched up used look and although the cockpit looks great already, these textures really make it feel like a work horse of an office. There's also some custom sound files that someone did that play with the high revs on take off, when you hit that certain manifold pressure and RPM it really sounds like the walls are coming down. For it's age, the sim product that is, it still is a phenomenal add on. On a hot summer night a couple of weeks ago, flying into Ketchikan in rotten weather and nasty crosswinds having to wrestle it around through the valley, I was dripping with sweat by the time I shut it down. It was probably the most fun I've ever had in flight sim. Don't think twice about it, go get it!

Exactly. No boring autopilot, hand flying the whole way. You need to keep ahead of it or it can bite.

G'day all, I'm pretty much a stranger around these parts in terms of posts but I check out the forums semi regularly, this place is by far the most informative and knowledgeable place to go for all things flight sim. Although I'm relatively quiet (as a smurf), I used to be known as Yoda on the old VOZ forums, with all my hobbies, it's hard to stay active on all the boards that go with them. Anyway, I just wanted to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a safe new year when it comes. A big thank you to all the staff and developers at Orbx for the outstanding work you guys do, it goes without saying how amazing of a contribution you guys make to flight sim, I simply couldn't go without it! Almost every time I click on here, there's a nice surprise waiting. My Christmas present to myself this year is Norway which is downloading now, a 2007 Toyota Corolla cause my Commodore has given up the ghost. A $500 bottle of Scotch and a $120 Cuban cigar (some of my other bank balance crippling hobbies ) Merry Christmas to each and every one of you, stay safe. Gazza P.S. One thing I miss about the old days is flying online and chatting with my good friend Wolter, I hope you're well mate. I made a lot of great friends on these forums and I regret losing touch with them, I'd like to get back to the good old days. Hell of a lot more fun when you're doing it with top blokes! Cheers

Took me by surprise to see them do a 182, and not in a good way. I thought they'd do something completely different. I work with 172's and 182's every day so it's all a bit been there done that. I'm itching for a new spiffy rendition of a B58

I've never been one for the big iron like PMDG stuff so, the A2A B-17 is the only "heavy" for me, rarely use the autopilot, you can easily hand fly it the whole way and just wait and feel for what it's doing and it takes little effort to pull her back into line. A real joy to fly, systems, flight dynamics, looks! What an aircraft! The only other thing that really gets a lot of air time is the Iris PC-9/A. It feels like a sports car with a low ride height and rock solid springs. Feels tight, on rails, one of the few add ons that really makes you feel like you OWN the skies. Great for complete disregard to the rules and also great for smartening up the skills and practicing nav's, having a flight plan prepared with frequencies and charts at the ready. Can be a very rewarding aircraft to fly properly but can also bite you in the arse if you let it get away from you, easy to do if you start to go all cowboy with it......... which is also easy to do, but that's the fun part!

Well, I've had P3DV2.2 installed for a little over a week now and I knew there'd be teething problems but this has got to be some kind of cruel joke. I've got settings turned WAAAYY down, within the sim itself, shadows off, airport control panels to a bare minimum, REX textures down to 512, thinking I'll walk it in and then start bumping things up, afraid not. The second a few clouds pop up in the sky the slideshow begins. Uninstalled REX clouds, same happens with default clouds. I don't want to turn this into a support thread, just saying that my experience so far hasn't been the green pastures that beckoned me over in the first place. But hey, spent the last few years tweaking FSX to get those short few minutes of bliss before springs and cogs burst out and explode everywhere......... I should be a pro at this by now!

I bit the bullet and moved over. Been in the process of doing it all in the past week. The only thing I'm struggling with at the moment is finding rock solid "settings". I've read that the CFG doesn't need tweaking so I'm gonna run with that, I'm over all that. I'd be happy if I never had to open it. Just trying to find a happy relationship between the sims settings and nvidia inspector.

I am the spares storeman for a fleet of 172's and I've had a run on batteries lately cause it's cold, don't really know why they pack in when it's cold, I just re order when I'm told but that'd be cool if it was a seasonal thing with the A2A Concordes

Hey thanks for all the replies. Yeah one of the first things I thought of was USB slots going to sleep but it seems I already had that base covered with all of them. This el cheapo hub that I have has two USB plugs that can go into the back of the motherboard and a mate of mine tells me that you'd plug them both in if you aren't using the external power supply because one of the plugs just draws extra power from another slot and has nothing to do with transferring data. So am I right in assuming that you only need the one plug in if you are using the power supply?

I bought REX4 and as far as I know, it's only textures, I use Opus for weather but if you ask me, REX4 feels like a stripped down version of Essentials plus overdrive which I had installed prior to REX4 and without a doubt REX4 looks fantastic, but so does Essentials. I'm kind of half half on it because I found that all of the available options in essentials was overwhelming so I like the simplicity of the REX4 interface but unless I can compare the two side by side, to me they both kind of feel like the same product.

My sim pit is getting bigger with two Saitek throttle quadrants, the trim wheel, the rudder pedals, a vr insight switch panel and the Warthog set up. Running out of USB slots was the least of my problems, I bought a 10 slot hub with a 5 volt 3 amp power supply and I started noticing things dropping out and losing connection, first the warthog, so I switched that back to the mobo slots, then the endless problems with the non existent trim wheel and then the prop and mixture levers started to give up the ghost, the switch panel is just a complete mess but that's another story. Tricky to figure out when the power lights are still on but you only find out somethings wrong when you go to move some levers or press some buttons. That gets me wondering why a 10 slot hub with it's own power supply can't provide enough juice for these remaining Saitek toys, rudder pedals, two quadrants and the trim wheel. And as I love wasting money, I bought another 10 slot hub but this one comes with a 5 amp power supply. Funnily enough it was almost impossible to find a replacement power supply alone. Has anyone else with multiple bits of hardware come across problems like this before?

That's spastic!

This is a fantastic idea! I hope you got a few good easter eggs for that this year!