Which one is closest to real....G2 or FMS

[Chamkeeper]

I fly both RF G2 and FMS. I can fly the heli's in FMS pretty well, but in G2 the heli's seems to be alot tougher to master. Which one of these is closest to the real thing?

Thanks

[surfimp]

Realflight G2 is more realistic by miles and miles. I'm not saying that G2 is super realistic, mind you--but relative to FMS, it's far more so. FMS is a very nice free program with pretty aircraft models. For basic orientation training, it's fine, but for realism, I think you'll really need to look elsewhere, especially for helis.

Steve

[Pookee]

You get what you pay for.

George

[Eric Brouwer]

Depending on your specific simulator needs, there are different simulators available. It all depends what you want out of the sims.

FMS is a freeware simulator, and ideal for the beginner. It will teach you the correct co-ordinations, and after some time on FMS, a beginner will no longer need to think what stick to move, it will become second nature. It's got thousands of models available on the internet, and lots of support in most of the R/C forums.

As for helis, FMS is not recommended for training. There are too many variables with helis that FMS does not allow for. I can fly the helis on FMS, but when trying the same on RealFlight G2, I can not even keep the heli in a steady hover. It lacks extra controls, more detailed gyro configurations, and does not have any throttle/pitch mixing or curves.

For RealFlight G2, I can give tons of credit... my son (12 years old) practiced helis using RealFlight G2 for about 6 months, and after seeing his flying, auto rotations and inverted hover, I realised that it was time to buy him a Raptor 50. His first flight with an instructor went perfect, and from his third lesson, he was hovering without the buddy cable.

Performance of sims goes hand in hand with it's pricetag. The more expensive, the more realistic. It is like buying a car. If you buy a Toyota, you will not get all the features, optional extras or performance that the guy with his 8 cylinder Merc gets. This does not mean that Toyota is a bad vehicle.

[surfimp]

FWIW, I got hovering down in FMS without much trouble, and then when I got Realflight G2, I had to relearn almost everything... FMS will teach you the absolute basics (like what the cyclic and collective do), but beyond that, it's quite limited and not particularly realistic. It's far harder to hover a real heli than to hover one in FMS, whereas with Realflight G2 (and surely some of the other sims, which I am not personally familiar with) you actually get some pretty good practice in.

The only free simulator that I can really advocate unequivocably is Slope Soaring Simulator. It's fantastic--not perfect, but far better than FMS IMHO and very good practice for sloping. But that's the only free sim that I am personally familiar with and that I think is really good.

Steve

[fprintf]

CRRCSim (the engine that Slope Soaring Simulator is/was based on) is pretty darn good for thermal training as well. I think the code was originally used by NASA for flight modeling.

As for FMS, it is rather lousy for anything but lefts and rights. But it is *very* good at that.