rlu

If you're not interested in the actual flying part then I'm not sure if it is worth it?

I think the path for most people is first they get interested in flight simulation, frequently in the context of flying airline jets. They start learning how that airliner works. How to start it up. How to program a flight plan & performance figures into it. How to use the autopilot. The concept of SIDs and STARs (departure and arrival procedures) (and again how to program them into the plane) and finally learning about all the different types of approaches like an ILS approach which allows the plane to break out of extremely low level clouds (think 200 feet, sometimes less!). And finally, how to perfect landings.

They do all of that usually offline. On their own, or with some plugins that inject fake AI traffic to make it a bit more immersive.

Then finally, once they have a grip on most of the above, then they hop onto VATSIM to add the challenge (just at start) and fun of talking to ATC and listening to other pilots. It just is really a great immersion factor to know there is another human being operating the plane that you're taxiing behind.

But if none of that initlal stuff sounds very interesting to ya then (1) no problem!! It's understandably not everyone's cup of tear but then also (2) probably not worth getting into VATSIM.

But if VATSIM on its own kind of intrigues you then maybe you can live vicariously through people on Twitch playing MSFS on it, or YouTube searching "msfs vatsim full flight"

> I enjoy flight sims, but I'm not sure I want to actually get a license.

This was me in late 2021 / early 2022.

I urge you to get a discovery flight! I did, and now I'm almost finished with my instrument rating. One of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. I love flying so much - more than I ever could have imagined.

Your wallet won't like it though.

If you use reddit I'd recommend lurking r/flying. Great community of pilots ranging from students to hobby pilots to 747 captains.

Totally fair point. I think VATSIM shines in IFR yet MSFS arguably shines at lower altitudes / in a more VFR way where you can sort of do whatever you want (i.e. don't have to fly an assigned heading or route).

I think flying VFR in an unrealistic way (ignoring airspace, altitude restrictions etc.) is plenty fun.

But, if you want to fly "realistic" VFR you could consider PilotEdge. It's like vatsim but more heavy on GA and commonly used by real life student pilots that want to practice procedures and ATC comms as close as possible to real life.

Just sharing in case you're interested :)

Step 1: Have an interest for it. It sounds like you might!

Once you know you want to, I think YouTube is a really fantastic resource. Also an active community on reddit (r/flightsim, r/MicrosoftFLightSim etc).

I recommend Microsoft Flight Simulator for most people just because it visually looks the best. People will say other sims have better flight dynamics but I'd argue that doesn't matter for 99.9% of people.

You need a pretty good PC to run MSFS though. There's also an Xbox version but it is less extensible. For example, you can't do VATSIM on Xbox.

I got my PPL irl last summer. IMO PilotEdge is fantastic for real pilots/student pilots that want to practice realistic VFR and/or IFR procedures.

But if you want to just "have fun" VATSIM is the way to go, at least for me.

Like PilotEdge I always use with a Cessna 172 and pair the sim up with ForeFlight. I'll expand my planes on it as I expand the planes I fly in real life. But the goal is to mimic real training as close as I can.

VATSIM I will always play with jets and fly IFR.

Sometimes when I look things up, I find forum discussions from over 15 years ago. It's interesting observing how at first you might not realize it, and then they make references that make you look at the date and you realize you're reading a back and forth discussion that took place over a decade ago and it's still available to look at. Do those people still have those same interests? So many little meaningless questions.

Anyways. Randomc omment but your comment reminded me of this lol.

> The training converges after a few days of number crunching on a GTX980 GPU. Let’s take a look at the results.

Stupid question: why is the GPU important here? I would have thought this was more of a CPU task..??

(then again, as I typed this I remembered that bitcoin farming is supposed to be GPU intensive so I'm guessing the "why" for that is the same as this)

great so can I login with my youtube account now? I don't think I ever migrated it to a Google account (despite being asked to like a million times - would always say "later") and now I have no idea how to login to it.

I dunno, I submitted a ticket a few weeks back for a refund and got a human. I guess his first reply was canned but when I called him out on it, he was helpful and provided me with a full refund. (I had added funds to my Steam wallet to buy an item on the marketplace and then got a 7 day market ban making me unable to use the money. A few mins later the item I wanted to buy had already been sold.)

Yeah it's weird especially since you just get done reading about how they get away with getting hit between the wings and then you get told "if you want to see this for yourself, watch the video" ... lol

Still a good read with fun drawings :)

Ahhh soooo annoying that it requires a Nexus 6. This sounds so awesome but I do not want a 6" phone. I'm hoping the next Nexus phone will have a smaller variant (and it will undoubtedly support Project Fi)

Oh god. The way he delivered it was even worse than reading it on all the news articles. He just said it with this tone of utter wisdom.

When she's giving her answer you can tell by his body language that he very quickly realized how the rest of his day would pan out.