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Environment and wind

RFM takes Reforger's weather wind and works out what the air's doing around your aircraft. There's nothing to set up per aircraft. Every bump you feel has a cause you can find:

  • Height above the ground. The game's wind is treated as the wind 10 m above open grass. It's weaker near the ground and picks up with height. Over forest or towns the wind is slower near the ground and rougher. Over water it's close to full strength and smooth.
  • What's upwind. Rough ground upwind (trees, buildings) makes the air reaching you bumpier, so downwind of a treeline or a town is rougher than open fields.
  • Buildings. Below about 150 m, every building-sized structure near you has a wake. The air slows down and rises in front of it, speeds up over the roof, and sinks and churns behind it. It also sheds eddies off its sides, alternating left and right. The effect fades out over about ten building heights downwind. Behind a hangar in strong wind, expect a real handful.
  • Terrain. You get lift on the windward side of a slope and sink on the lee side. Behind steep ground the flow breaks up and the air gets rough.
  • Weather and time of day. A clear night is the smoothest. Overcast without rain is steady since nothing's heating the ground. Rain makes it gustier, storms way gustier.
  • Sun. Sun on land heats the ground from mid-morning to late afternoon. That makes thermals (columns of rising air with sinking air around them) and big, slow convective turbulence. Cloud, rain and night turn it off. There are no thermals over water, and strong wind breaks them up.

The small-scale detail of the turbulence is random, same as in professional sims. It never repeats, but how strong it is always comes from the causes above.

With Debug Log on (Flight, category 82), each [RFM-ENV] line shows the wind at the hub, the surface roughness, how much turbulence each cause is adding, the thermal under you and how many building wakes are in range. The first few [RFM-ENV] surface tile lines show what it found on the ground.

For tuning tests you want to repeat (hover collective and torque), turn Environment Use Vanilla Wind off and set Environment Manual Wind Speed to 0. Just remember to turn it back on after. Even a 5 m/s breeze makes a noticeable difference to hover power.