OK, got a dumb question about thermals in FSX:

What should the weather settings be to get some good ones?

I tried to have a nice hot layer down low, with cooler ones on top to get the heat to rise.  No dice....no thermals.  I then tried using the "Building Storms" theme, thinking that would have some nice unstable air in it.....sure, there were building cumulus, but no thermals.

How do I set this thing to get some good thermals anywhere I want (I'd rather fly at my home glider port in Pensacola, FL).

Thanks!

--Rich

That's a  very good question indeed.
One thing that sould be said in this subject is that you get more thermals if you are closer to the equator than if you are closer to the polar circles.
This is why I think we get a lot of thermals in swiss alps with the "nice weather" (not "clear weather") and we get almost nothing in the mountains near Seattle or Vancouver.

I wonder of the generation of the thermals can be in any way altered by third parties...
Would be cool to force the sim to generate "waves", you know, those winds that goes up following the hill slopes...

The thermals in FSX are definitely too sparse compared to reality... I mean, maybe the "real" thermals are OK, bt all this "wave" stuff is missing... In real life, I have a friend who does paragliding, and he frequently explains me with photos the path he took across the mountains, from a slope to another, using winds -waves- or thermals...

AHHHHH...thermals.  Lot's of talk about them and lot's of mis-information.

As a LONG time RC Sailplane flyer, and also having a number of hours in Sailplanes in both thermal and ridge lift, maybe I can shed a wee bit of light on the subject.

Thermals are pretty simple critters.  They are a column of rising air.  This air is rising because it is warmer than the surrounding air.  Note that it makes no difference how warm or cold the air is.  All that matters is that there is a temperature difference.

Now, I don't have enough experience in FSX to claim to know how thermals are generated in the sim, but I can tell you a bit about the real world.

Thermals come from uneven heating of the earth by the sun.  If you've ever walked barefoot in the summer you have felt this first hand when stepping from a grassy area onto a paved area.  Now, in time, the air above the paved area will become warmer than the air above the grass.  At a certain point (don't ask about HOW much warmer cause I can't tell you that)  that air will 'break loose' and start to rise.  That air will rise and start cooling off as it rises.  Eventually it will be at the same temperature as the surrouding air, and the thermal has 'topped out'.  USUALLY, that also results in a cloud as the water vapor in the rising air condenses.  Thermals also 'drift' with the wind, and will always be 'down wind' from the point that they were generated from.

When looking for thermals you look for large paved areas, dark areas of land such as freshly plowed fields, any place where there are distinct differences in the color of the terrain.  Darker areas will be the 'thermal generators'.

You can visualize a thermal as being almost like an old fashioned ice cream cone.  Narrow at the bottom, and getting larger as it rises, with the ice cream/cloud at the top.  They will be stronger in the center, and at lower altitudes, you will have to be in a pretty steep bank to stay in one.  As you gain altitude, you can flatten out the turn more and stay in lift.

Finding thermals can be difficult at times, but the same areas ALWAYS produce thermals, and around glidere ports, and RC Flying fields we call them 'house thermals'.  It's pretty easy to tell when you have found a thermal.  A well trimmed sailplane will do one of two things, depending on what part of a thermal you find.  If you fly directly into one, the nose will rise, the airspeed will fall off, and the sailplane will want to stall.  If this happens, you put a bit of forward presssure on the stick to 'penetrate the thermal', watch your vario, and fly THRU it until you lose the lift and then turn back into it.  If you find the edge of a thermal the sailplane will want to turn AWAY from the thermal as the rising air under one wing will make it rise and bank away from the lift.  If that happens, you simply turn bank back into the rising wing, and use your vario to 'center the lift' and off you go.

Finding the center of the thermal is the hardest part.  You need to use your vario, and vary your bank so that you get (if possible) an equal rate of climb thru the whole circle.  Generally, you want to increase your bank as the vario starts to drop off, and lessen it as the vario rises.

That's just a general once-over, but it should be enough info to get you started.

Here are a couple of sites that probably explain it better than I can (plus they have pitcures)   

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/nature/q0253.shtml

http://www.answers.com/topic/gliding ; this has a lot og good likns in it also

Daube wrote on Jan 7^th, 2007 at 9:23am:



I am sure it can all be changed. FSX was designed with the developer in mind, moreso than FS9.

The flight/flight time I posted above should display a thermal over Seattle. If not, the questions I would have are:

What type of hardware are you using?

Several days ago someone posted a FPS fix about replacing the Weather folder in FSX with the one from FS9. Did you happen to do that because if so, you can most likely kiss the improved weather and with it the flight dynamics and thermals good-bye in FSX. Something I would never do. I paid for FS10. Reverting the weather back to FS9 is silly and counterproductive to moving to the next level of simulation.

Most of the texture fixes and file replacement fixes posted are mute, have little affect on the sims performance and actually make it run/look worse on decent hardware. The only fixes that have any substantial affects are replacing the autogen tree description file and reducing just the building textures. Replacing the autogen building files is another mute fix. The rest of FSX performance comes from the hardware setup, proper Windows setup and defrag (very important) and configuration file edits.

Although very slow video cards can see improvements with all those posted hacks (simply because the hardware won't ever show the higher details and better dynamics to their full potential) doing all the fixes will net little or no improvement for systems that run the sim with respectable results. My own hardware would display strange intermittant stutters and render poor image quality even with everything set up right after doing all the texture and autogen fixes. I lost many subtle visuals that make the experience what it is. I have since reinstalled and everything works fine now with no loss.


I am wondering if perhaps some fix is causing the problem because you should see and experience a thermal over the city of Seattle at 1:30-2pm under fair weather conditions.

By the way, my computer is an AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 2.0GHz, with 1.5GB RAM and a Radeon 9600 Pro (256 MB) video card.

It works fine with most of the scenery details set at MEDIUM HIGH and sometimes even better.

--RB

aH, I COULDNT FIND ANY OF THE BIRDS AT ALL!