Hello everybody,
First of all, I wish you all a happy 2008.
The last week, I did my initiation flights on this wonderful sim .
Here is a little debriefing for all the SMM2007 pilots and future pilots.
Being a flightsim enthusiast from the very beginning of flightsimming on a PC (my first flightsim was on a TRS-80
) until the latest Ms flightsimulator X; I’ve to say that SMM 2007 blows a new wind in the flightsimming world.
It gives you actually to do something; a mission with different tasks you have to accomplish. It gives you a real sense of accomplishment when you finish a mission, something which I don’t find in the same degree, in other flightsimulations.
Now before everybody start shouting about the shortcomings in the different missions
; in most of the cases there is a workaround and for others I’m sure they will be patched in the near future.
I never owned a flightsim for which no patch or servicepack was needed after the first release.
The support for SMM2007 is excellent; the people are actually listening to us users, and they participate in this forum. They even plan additional missions in the future and a sequel to SMM2007.
Also the hints & tips from colleague SMM2007 pilots are excellent.
SMM2007 is more a simulation than just a game, and is both educational as challenging. It is not the kind of simulation in which you can jump right into and fly it spot on from the first time. (Than it would be more of an arcade game
) It needs from you, the pilot, some basic knowledge of the systems and/or, to do some research on how things work. The space shuttle is the most complex flying machine to date, and the pilots who fly them are experienced Navy pilots with thousands of flying hours under their belts.
Within the constraints of a PC, I think SMM2007 does a good job in simulating some of the procedures of the real space shuttle, this is as close as we can get, otherwise we need to own a multimillion dollar simulator; which unfortunately is out of my league.
For sure I can tell you there is a big difference in flying a real airplane, and flying the same model on a PC flight simulator. The PC simulator can teach you very well all the procedures to follow and/or doing some procedural flying. But flying an airplane is much of a “feeling” which unfortunately a PC can’t simulate; keep this in mind if you land the shuttle in SMM2007.
One more thing; in the event you have a delay in switching from the 3D virtual view to the 2D panels even when you have the required graphics card, than switch off the clouds and cloud shadows; the other graphical settings you can leave on high. I think this is somehow related to the textures used for the clouds.
Sofar my debriefing, I now go on further exploring.
