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6.9. ENABLING A SMOKE TRAIL 69
With the World/MTBF tab selected, the mean time between failure setting is visible at
the bottom of the screen. When the use mean time between random failures box is checked,
the simulator will use the value to the right to determine how often, on average, each piece of
equipment will fail. For instance, if the MTBF is set to 1000 hours, X-Plane will decide that each
piece of hardware in the plane has about a one in a thousand chance of breaking each hour. Since
the airplane has a few hundred pieces of hardware, that means a failure might occur every 5 to 20
hours or so.
The other tabs in this window let the user set the frequency of such failures, or command specific
failures, for hundreds of different aircraft systems.
The general failure categories are:
• Equipment
• Engines
• Flying Surfaces
• G1000 (if you have a real G1000 attached to X-Plane)
• All Instruments, and
• NAVAIDs
6.9 Enabling a Smoke Trail
A smoke trail, as might be used by an aerobatic airplane in an airshow, can be enabled behind your
aircraft by opening the Aircraft menu and clicking Toggle Puff Smoke. This control is assigned to
the ‘x’ key by default.
6.10 Speeding Up the Simulation
By pressing Alt+T on the keyboard, you can increase the simulation speed to 2× the standard
speed. Pressing Alt+T repeatedly will increase the speed to 4×, then 6×, and then it will finally
return the simulator back to standard speed.
Note that if your computer cannot run the simulation at the required frame rate, X-Plane will
slow its measurement of time to compensate. This is seen most often for users running at standard
speed, but failing to maintain 20 frames per second. When X-Plane runs slower than 20 fps, it
slows down its simulation of real-time so that the simulator is “effectively” running at 20 fps. For
instance, if the simulator is running at 10 fps due to extreme rendering settings, X-Plane will run
the flight model at half speed. The result is that the physics are integrating in slow-motion in order
to avoid destabilizing from the low framerate. Thus, if you need real-time simulation, you must run
the simulator at 20 fps or faster.
6.11 Taxiing More Accurately
In commercial aircraft, a nosewheel tiller is used to more accurately align the nosewheel to the
taxi lines, and to get the aircraft safely docked at jetways. You can assign an axis on your joystick
to control this tiller by opening the Joystick & Equipment dialog box (from the Settings menu)
and, in one of the drop-down menus in the Axis tab, selecting nosewheel tiller. Note that this
is the same procedure used in setting up the joystick axes normally, as described in the section
“Configuring Flight Controls” of Chapter 4.