Can't fly over the north pole

[TW]

Hi thanks for the answers to my previous messages.

Last evening I was flying the Beechcraft King 350 from Alert, Canada  to the north pole. When I reached the N89* 30', I couldn't get any closer to the pole because my plane would go sidways, left or right instead of all four directions. In order to head back south, I had to go into slew mode and back the plane up a degree or two of latitude. Otherwise I would only be able to go left or right in an endless circle around the north pole. My only guess it's either a sim limit (like the 100,000ft ceiling limit) or electromagnetic energy between the north pole and magnetic north pole, causing the Beechcraft props to spin different.

I was wandering if any one tried to fly there as well? I want to eventually go on a multi leg pole to pole tour and take some snapshots and post them into an online travel log.

TW

[FSTipster]

You'll be disappointed I'm afraid. Neither pole exists within the sim. You reached the limit of the scenery.

[TW]

Thanks, I guess I'll have to settle for going to the 89.5 degree lines.

[ozzy72]

TW the problem is that m$ modelled the world as a cylinder rather than a globe (I have no idea why!), so the Arctic Circle is the limit.

Ozzy

[RollerBall]

The reason is that the scenery in FS is based on what are called LOD (Level of Detail) areas and cells. To make for simpler programming, these are all rectangular in shape.

If you look at a schoolroom globe, you'll find that the shapes resulting from intersecting longitude and latitude lines are only rectangular at the equator - as you move towards the poles they become highly distorted in the shape of a trapezium - parallel top and bottom sides but with sides that slope inwards.

It would be very expensive to program to work with 'real' shapes and you'd need much more processing power than you have with your little PC esp with all the other work it's doing while you're running your sim.

Hope this explains things!



Roger

[ozzy72]

Thought it might be something like that Roger, but I didn't want to make a WAG (Wild-Ass-Guess) on the issue. I wonder if they've sorted this for ACOF?

Mark

[FSTipster]

Thought it might be something like that Roger, but I didn't want to make a WAG (Wild-Ass-Guess) on the issue. I wonder if they've sorted this for ACOF?

Mark

I'd be extremely surprised if they have but we can hope...

[Iroquois]

I made it to the South Pole once in Slew mode. Not much there though. Will get some screenshots to prove my claim.