Weather

I love instrument flying and would appreciate being able to bring cloud ceilings down lower. I forget what the minimum was but it was fairly high. It would be nice if they could come down to the precision approach 200 foot minimums, and even a little lower so we may have to go around and divert. Thanks for any consideration!

oh you can definitely do that. Check out this video, its uncut footage from a 132nd flight where we practiced Precision Approach Radar (no ILS set intentionally, you get vectored in by ATC and get a talk-on onto the proper glidepath).

Its lengthy so you might have to fast-forward but it should show the point

Can't get on youtube at work but I'll check it out later. Would you mind explaining to me how to lower the ceilings though? In the mission editor the lowest I could get it was like 5000 or 6000 feet, something like that and I end up using the visibility option to get it lower. I apologize for my ignorance in the original post.

iirc there should be a fog slider below the cloud settings

So the fog is just visibility and doesn't add a ceiling. What I'd like to see is a ceiling that can come down below precision approach minimums. Multiple cloud layers would be awesome too, but I'd settle for being able to make the clouds go up to about 20k feet. Hopefully this wouldn't be too difficult to add into 2.5? Wouldn't be worth the time to add into 1.5 when 2.5 is (hopefully) less than a year away.

It's already possible on Nevada map, with some of its bases located much much higher than the ones on the old map, above the minimum cloud base treshold of the current weather engine.

Well picking a higher elevation airport isn't a solution its a workaround... I do that in Nevada and appreciate the help. I'm just hopeful the Dev's will include it, since we have three training aircraft it's a legitimate feature to want. And would be useful for the more devious mission designers.

It would also be nice to be able to place multiple cloud layers into a mission. :thumbup:

For weather as a whole here's everything I'd like to see (a few of these other's have also mentioned):

• More weather options: haze, dew point/humidity, wind gusts, wind sheer, sea state etc are all possible additions. Another important one is cloud layers with the ability to define the altitudes (which should satisfy the OP) as well as the ability to set cloud type and density for each layer (the bottom most layer could also have fog available to it).
  
• Define different weather in different areas, these may be within the vicinity of airfields or cities or could apply to MGRS/Geographical grid squares or maybe even user defined (have drawable zones that weather applies to). It would be good here to set the weather and set the regions it applies to, just for the sake of saving time, so you don't have to go through each zone and define the weather each. Another possible option could be to have a checkbox for 'apply to all' that will set the weather map wide, the whole map will be in that weather state, like what the current weather does.
  
• Weather that changes over time. Here what would be brilliant is a timeline of a user defined length, here you can add stages with times in between to set the weather in each zone. So for instance at mission start the weather at xxxx is at state 1 (wind A, temperature A, cloud A blah blah blah) as the mission progresses and during a time period the weather transitions to state 2 (wind B, temperature B, cloud B blah blah blah) and so on as the user desires, once the last defined stage is reached it will stay like that for the rest of the mission. If the user just enters one weather state and leaves it, it will remain at state 1 indefinitely (again, which is what the current weather system does). For zones you could have a timeline for each zone but that may prove time consuming, so maybe if a system can be worked out that adjusts the weather to suite weather in adjacent zones and work from there automatically maybe?
  
• Static objects for weather stations, these would ideally consist of individual objects as a single sensor and/or one single unit with several sensors attached to it. In the case of several individual sensors these would ideally be grouped together to form a station (in a similar fashion to what we have to do to get ground crew at FARPs) these would then be paired with a mast or antenna acting as a transmitter (obviously templates and groups for static objects will have to come first) but hey presto we've got a similar system to ATIS/VOLMET that we can place anywhere we like, with the weather information available depending on what sensors are present and functional (for triggerable failures etc). With the single unit idea it would just be a single static object with an integrated transmitter and then checkboxes (like we have for hardpoints, additional armour, exhaust suppressors like we have as additional properties for aircraft) for which sensors are available. Obviously the user will be able to assign radio messages, frequencies and transmission power like in the transmit message advanced waypoint action.
  
• ATC actually paying attention to the weather, I've lost count how many times ATC has told me to land and takeoff in tailwinds as opposed to headwinds. (Player controlled ATC would be fantastic for this purpose. Though in general improved ATC will be one of the big things here.
  

I'll post more as I think of them