The very silly argument about stationay versus moving ships.

[JeremiahChopper 9]

Hello, my name is Jeremiah. I have been flying helicopters for the last 33 years. I started in the Royal Canadian Navy and am at this moment working in the forestry industry. Without tooting my own horn, I know a few things about helicopters. And I hope to shed some light on the moving versus non-moving ship issue.

 

To see if a ship moves from an aircraft or a helicopter is a very complex issue. Basically, it is almost always hard and often impossible. Luckily, from a helicopter point of view, it does not matter a lot. I will explain. I have read that you would see the difference if you hovered in a helicopter. That is incorrect and easy to explain.

 

There are two (three) kinds of hover:

1. Hover on a location (so relative to the Earth). This is ONLY possible when you have visual references. You can not hover in a cloud, and you can not hover at 2500 feet (because all references are too far away). Again, you can also not over in location over water because there are no visual references to measure your lateral movement.
2. Hover over an object. The same applies as above, but your reference is a single object this time. That object might move or be stationary; your hover is relative to the object. Unless the object moves fast (say 30 knots or more),  it is exactly as difficult as the first type of hover. Why? Because there is zero difference between wind and movement. Any air vehicle flies in the bubble of air surrounding it. If that bubble is not moving or moving at 500 knots makes simply no difference whatsoever. The aircraft/helicopter will fly exactly the same. From the pilot’s point of view, there is NO difference between hovering over a moving ship and hovering over a stationary ship. They will not see or feel the difference.
3. The last kind of hover, and only mentioned to be complete, is hover in relation to the wind. Here you related your hover to the wind, aiming to make your airspeed zero. In relation to the ground, you will move with the wind. Not very useful, but most helicopter pilots who do offshore work will have trained on it because it is a great way to understand hovering in relation to objects. It is easy to do over the sea or at altitude, but very hard low to the ground as your mind keeps using the ground as a reference.

 

Now on to being able to see if a ship moves. Easy for a speedboat (55 knots) but much harder for a supertanker (14 knots). Unless you know the wind speed/heading, sea current speed/heading) you simply can never be sure. A heavily laden ship with its propeller 7 meters under the surface will only have a wake generated by the water flowing along the hull. If that water is flowing because the ship is under steam or anchored in a current, it makes no difference. The wake will look exactly the same.

 

As somebody who has done over 1500 landings on ships (we used helicopters for custom control, flying customs officers out to ships), I can tell you I) could often not see at what speed (or no speed) a vessel was moving. I can also tell you we simply did not care.  If the sim makes it easy to see if a ship moves or not, it is an error of the sim. If the sim makes it possible to hover in place over the sea (without GPS based system) the sim is wrong.

 

If there is any question I can assist with, feel free to ask. I have just starter with MSFS for a few weeks and while the helicopter dynamics leave a lot to be desired, exploring the North Sea has been so much fun. The coast of Canada is not as shallow as the North Sea so you see far less objects (and thus vessels).

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

What a kind explanation!

 

Question.... do I understand you correct when I say a empty vessel is much easier to see moving because of the prop wash? So we should increase the wake effect for the unloaded vessels ( we do have both loaded and unloaded versions of our vessels).

 

[JeremiahChopper 9]

Ohhh absolutely! An empty supertanker makes a very visible wake because part of the prop is above the waterline. That makes a huge amount of bubbles or air and most of the time those are very visible (their surface is very reflective).

 

I have been testing a few of the other marine traffic files from flightsim.to, but they are all not very intelligent. I love the way you show the natural gas and oil tankers deep in the water when they go towards Rotterdam and show them unloaded when they go the other way.  That is clever! Also the small fishing vessels along the coast (shrimp?) and the bigger trawlers on the Doggersbank making their tracks. Being able to see the anchorages... It all makes sense, while the other ship add-ons are more or less placing ships on random  tracks.

 

I love files like  Global AI Ship Traffic etc. And I will ALWAYS have those active when I am not over the North Sea.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

Very good point.

 

It might have sounded like we do not like the other marine traffic DLC. But that is far from the truth. We have invited most of those teams into our Discord channels (not all responded) and they have been part of the very earliest beta. They had access to the locations of our objects and the areas where their ships are simply not allowed to come.  As they route ships they are able to adapt the routes to make sure the routes are more realistic and avoid wind parks, construction sites and platforms. Our objects are placed 100% correctly, if any of their ships collides with them, there is simply not a lot we can do about that. In fact there is nothing we can do.

 

But just like you, when I am not flying the North Sea I have Global Shipping Traffic active and love it!

[cbc 12]

Would it not be a good idea to tell us which third party developers participated in your Beta so that we know which of our ship add-ons will play nicely with Offshore Landmarks North Sea?

 

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

Very simple, there is no 3rd party that really places ships where they should be. I just posted about this in the Preview topic about the Gulf Of Mexico:

• The placement is semi random, so you will see ships drive through rigs, more obvious through the massive wind parks etc.
• You will also not be able to see correct shipping lanes and where they cross etc.  See where the big routes are? Where big fishing vessels go? Where the maintenance vessels go to wind parks? See where the small fishing vessels stay very close to the coast to catch shrimp? See where the big construction sites are? That is what we model.
  

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• You will see ships where they are not allowed to be.
• You will miss the correct geolocation such as shrimp boats where the shrimps are, fishing vessels on the fishing grounds or headed to and from them
• Heavy loaded tankers coming into the North Sea, empty tankers going out
• You will miss the 2500 ships that are at anchor (1/4 of ships on the North Sea are not moving at any given moment). Fly over the channel and the fist thing you see are the large anchorages where hundreds of ships at waiting!
• You will miss all the construction vessels being at work, all the other industrial vessels like dredgers doing maintenance or sucking up sand
• You will see only 1/3 of the ships that are actually there.

 

It is NOT about compatibility. It is about realism. If the other DLC places and routes ships where they are allowed to be and where they should be, there is no issue. 

Now do not get me wrong. when I am not in the North Sea or in The Gulf of Mexico, I love these add-ons. They make things look good. But when I get get realism over 'looking good' I know what I pick.  We placed thousands of ships where they logically should be. Where they HAVE been. 

 

But if you still prefer other parties doing the ships.... just remove the ones we did, easy as pie! Just read the manual. Just do not not report bugs about conflicts unless you are 100% sure the ship placement is correct and our object si placed wrong.

 

But until any other DLC will place ships where they are, where they have been or where they will be, they will simply possibly conflict with the real world. We decided to model what is there.