![]() ![]() Having 'fully' overhauled and reassembled an engine once without noticing an easy-to-miss blown head gasket, it's unlikely you'll ever do it again. Over time you speed up, taking fewer unnecessary steps and making fewer gaffes. You find yourself delving deeper and learning more with each passing challenge. Work sheets talk of taxiing problems, misfiring engines and heavy landings rather than baldly stating which parts need to be located and renewed. The game has an endearing way of suggesting without spelling-out. That said, without the career's dash of detective work and steady dribble of new activities, Zen-like absorption would probably morph into boredom in time. Myriad little touches like these make the game's daily grind unexpectedly satisfying. I love the way that the cranks on the jacks employed when servicing the undercart turn effortlessly as you 'take up the slack' then abruptly stiffen when lifting the weight of the aircraft. The small manually-propelled oil bowser rolls and pivots with just the right amount of inertia. Because unhooking the fuel hose from the Albion refueller, dragging it across to your carefully placed stepladder, then ascending, inserting the nozzle into the Moth's upper-wing fuel tank, and darting back to the truck to begin pumping, is so pleasingly tactile/musical, I've yet to weary of it.ĭisaster Studio have modelled other regular duties with similar care. A mundane task you're expected to perform in perhaps one out of every two missions, this multi-step chore would quickly become tiresome if it wasn't for redolent equipment physics and some nice sound effects. Fortunately the majority of other activities are simmed far more sensitively and literally. The maintenance minigame is PMS at its most stylized. Occasionally, something is eligible for refurbishment meaning you scamper off to a work bench in the corner of the blast pen, examine the malfunctioning gizmo, searching for its four 'lube points', which you then attempt to lubricate using neither too much or too little oil. More often than not faulty and worn parts must be replaced (a well-stocked parts truck stands closeby at all times). Click on a component in diagnostic mode and, after a short ruminative pause, the component's condition is indicated with text and colour-coding. To unfasten a line of bolts you simply touch them in turn with a dragged cursor – a sage piece of shorthand that prevents encounters with elaborately secured parts like crankcase covers from turning into exasperating mouse marathons. Assuming you're not playing at 'expert' difficulty (a setting I'm saving for playthrough #2) clicking on a component in disassembly mode highlights the nuts and bolts that must be removed to free it. Most work is accomplished with the aid of the WASD keys, a moveable stepladder, and a tri-mode cursor. Its airframe, rigging, instruments, cockpit controls, and flight control surfaces are either staggeringly robust or someone else's responsibility as you're never asked to attend to these. Roughly handled by ham-fisted novices, your charge's undercarriage, prop and four-cylinder Gipsy Major engine often require attention. ![]() The first twenty or so of the 81 missions involve a de Havilland Tiger Moth, the biplane trainer on which the majority of RAF pilots of the period learnt the basics of airmanship. Plausibly and sensibly, before being letting loose on Fighter Command's finest, you must prove yourself on its lowliest. You play an RAF ' erk' shinning up a greasy career pole by completing a lengthy series of engrossing maintenance and repair jobs on British WW2 aircraft. New ETA: next Wednesday) takes the cars and contemporariness out of Car Mechanic Simulator and replaces them with flying machines and the early 1940s. ![]() Plane Mechanic Simulator (Original ETA: yesterday. ![]() Resigned to this state of affairs, I really wasn't expecting an unheralded spanner-em-up from Poland to restore my sense of awe. Deprived then spoilt rotten, the sight of a polygonal warbird with elliptical wings no longer makes my heart beat faster. Ubiquity has diluted their mystique. I've experienced something similar with virtual Spitfires. Today, thanks largely to changes in gamekeeping practices and pesticide use, these handsome raptors are everywhere and consequently I no longer automatically stop and stare when I see one. To encounter one in southern England in the 1970s was magical. Red kites and buzzards were as rare as rocs and phoenixes when I was growing up. ![]()
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