Earth easter eggs

[unixronin]

At this moment, I am (virtually speaking) flying an F-16 northwest over the Himalayas, bearing 310°, airspeed about 530 knots, altitude 36,400 feet.  I took off from Kathmandu about 20 minutes ago.

Microsoft Flight Simulator, you're thinking?

Nope.  Google Earth.  It's a hidden feature in the latest version.

Want to find it?  Download and install Google Earth 4.2, start it up, and hit Ctrl-Alt-A (Ctrl-Opt-A on OS-X).  Find the full details here.

You'll probably want to click mouse1 to enable mouse mode, unless you have a joystick.  If you have a joystick attached, the sim will use it.  If you're using keyboard or mouse, expect to crash on your first takeoff, because it'll take you a minute or two to get Google's elevator control response figured out.  Do your best to ignore the cross-hair mouse position indicator on the screen, because it's not telling you what your brain is telling you it's telling you, and it WILL screw you up.  And no, as far as I've been able to figure out, there is no way to get a map display of your "actual" position; you'll have to either rely on dead reckoning, or use another window to try and fudge navigation as best you can.

But it's cool, and hey!  It's free.  :)

(The F-16 simulation seems badly underpowered, though.  The aircraft selection screen when you start it up says, correctly, that the F-16 can accelerate in a vertical climb; but the Google Earth F-16 sim can't maintain airspeed in a 20° climb at full throttle, and you'll have a hard time getting much over 500 knots¹ above about 20,000 feet except in a dive.)

Update:

Turns out when you exit flight simulator, it puts the map view at the point you'd reached.  You can then choose to resume from that point.  So, it's a bit kludgy, but there is a way to use map navigation.  (Turned out I flew about two thirds of the way from Kathmandu to Islamabad and was pretty much dead on course ... not bad for dead-reckoning.)

But, be warned!  When you re-enter the flight sim, be prepared to regain control of the aircraft in a hurry, because mouse control will be deselected and you'll probably be gyrating wildly.  When I resumed flight, I found myself in a 40° nose-down attitude with hard aileron right, rolling hard right in a steep spiral dive.  I lost 12,000 feet before I could regain control.  I successfully dead-reckoned my way the rest of the way to Islamabad, and found the airport, but was unable to keep it in sight long enough to land ... it seems like once you get below about five thousand, everything on the ground just turns into pretty much a uniform grey blur and it's impossible to tell how far above actual ground level you are.

[1]  Actually, I got a lot better performance flying from LAX to SFO.  I begin to wonder if the altimeter is reading altitude above ground, which would mean that when I was flying over Nepal at around 36,000 to 46,000 feet, I was actually at 45,000 to 55,000 barometric.  However, this doesn't explain why ground level at Islamabad appeared to be at about 3000 feet indicated altitude.

Comments

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

plus the new version does astronomy/sky as well!

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