Just curious as to whether or not Capt Sim is planning any new aircraft for FSX/P3D? Very quiet at the moment all over! And no not trying to start a new topic about what would I would like to see, that has been done to death already. Everybody wants something different including me!

Evan, I fully agree to your points. 

Ah well guess I will just have to keep playing around with the other mobs L1011 in the meantime. Yep and some fixes for some bugs in the other stuff would be nice too.

It seems the downturn in other places and worldwide is starting to bite in the flight sim world, there are a lot of dead sites and a lot of the community freeware effort has gone now as I am sure the cost of maintaining sites etc is too much for some and not enough bums on the seats for others. Then again there was a lot good stuff done in FS2004 and it seems the changes in modelling systems etc and lack of compatibility has meant for many it has just become too hard and who can afford it anyway, so they have given it away. Starting to see the same trend in some simmers who just cannot justify upgrading PC's etc. Then again if you look at the real world of aviation you can hardly get excited about a B787 or Airbus A350.

you know I was wondering what they could come up with and started thinking outside the fsx box. I'm not a fan of military aircraft in fsx as they have their own very good simulators.

But I thought about the early 50's and there were some very interesting jet powered sea planes. One was quite a large American 4 engine bomber which flew at just under mach 1.

The other I thought of was an Ekranoplan. Now I'd love to see one of those modelled correctly.  

*Think of the possibilities, Lou and Bruce sailing the high seas (well 20ft) at 500mph while sipping on their martinis. (shaken, not stirred!)

Nah, seaplanes are really hard to model well in FSX, love them nonetheless and collect all of them, the good the bad and the ugly. Problem with flying boats and amphibians or seaplanes if you like is that you got nowwhere to park them and serious flying boat bases and facilities are non existant. Had a go at one or two but have not got the hang of the object placement tools yet!

I would still love to see the other 707 variants, 128, 720 etc even the RR powered 300 of BOAC would be good. Nah tell em their dreaming.

Yes, the cooling down of flight simulation is something I have always predicted. The reason are new planes, fly-by-wire and the boring cockpits with two big screens.

Simming is about enjoying a challenge, like how people got amazed at visiting the cockpit because of all those instruments, knobs, lights, etc. Today a modern cockpit doesn't impress people anymore...

Once people understood what GPS does for their lives, be it in a car or in a plane, everything is pretty much the same. Before their was curiosity with navigation, vor, ils...people wonder how planes went from a to b. Pilots were heroes. Captains were God. Stewardess were pop stars. That is what made a flightsim so popular in from FS4 in an IBM PS2. The magic of flying.

There is no magic anymore, just programming GPS, FMC, and inputing painlessly data on computers within your computer. We are just simulating computer data filling. That's not fun.
Do you know why we don't simulate cars riding along streets? Because its a pretty straightforward process that even my granny can do it.

Captainsim will be one of the last ones because they have kept around the classics, but again this niche is small. I read some guys here never saw a Tristar, just by internet pics. The thing is the Tristar is not that old, I flew in some in the 90s. Imagine about the other models.

Xplane is overrated, when come to facts, when you sit in a cockpit, even a payware, you feel like in a drawn cockpit, it doesn't feel real.

A DC8 would be welcome, its the only plane from the golden era that lacks a good CS quality addon. The future will allow for continuous services for the current planes, or relaunches when technology allows better cabin interaction with moving people, but not in this platform of course.

CoastalDriver wrote on Sep 9^th, 2013 at 1:51pm:

Maybe I should rephrase it...
its cooling down "compared to" the euphoria that flightsim was between FS98 and FS2004.

for those who were not regular flightsimmers in that period the amount of Forum interest, addon releases, virtual airlines, scenery developpers, etc etc was far larger than today, as was the amount of hours spent in flightsim by average simmers.

and its not fair to say the addons were of weak quality, they were considering the technology of the day, extremely advanced, I can mention a few, like the same 727 by captainsim for fs2002/fs9, the DF737 and many freewares like David Maltby and others, some still unsurpassed by todays developpers, or that took many years for a better one to come up.

the 737NG excellently done by the other is a special plane, a) first its the most widely used passenger plane flown today, given this boring world of few models compared to other epochs.
b) Any Tommy teen I-want-to-be-a-pilot carreer dreamer is bound to study and fly the 737ng thoroughly.

So, for introducing to carreeer and training flightsim will be the all favorite simulator, cheap, available and pretty accurate in some features.

But what about flightsim as a hobby? that's the cooling down I meant....compared to...to give you an idea, flightsim created such curiosity in gamers that it was more popular than MS Word or Excel in the early days. Bill Gates had to bundle FS4 with Windows because everybody was talking about siumulating flying a plane.

I see you like the 747..which developer you fly with? the other? come on! any simmer that has been on a 747 can tell their work is still cartoonish, its using gauges and graphics from fs2000, did you know that even Captainsim, the 727, 707 they are using the same gauges released by their first 727 back in ...when 2003?
Ten years have passed! reason? good developpers have also moved on to other things

I agree with most posters, that they should finish the Tristar first, and then release a couple of service packs for various current aircraft.

After that there could plenty of options with expansion from current basepacks: a RR Convay equipped 707-400, the 707-100, 707-200.. In fact the entire 707 versions up to the -700 series with High bypass turbofan engines.

And then we have the 767-400.

Next in the line, a classic 741/742 would be nice.

Further out in the future we could imagine the DC-8 and Convair 880/990.

BR
Anders