What's the "-1" all about in aircraft characteristics?

[mjl1966]

I looked in the user manual - no dice. 

Aircraft Characteristics Tab::PMDG 737-800NGX

A few examples-

Max Takeoff Weight: -1
Cabin Service Alt: -1

Cruise speed: -1

What's the story?  More importantly, what will I break if I fiddle with these?

And if it's documented somewhere - point me at it... I don't mind reading what's done been writ before.

[peter]

Hello Mjl1966,

a value of -1 indicates that these values are not set - but they should be. I just checked the configuration files on my system, and the values are properly set:

MaxTakeoffWeight=174200
ServiceAGL=18000
CruiseSpeed=470

You can use FSCaptain without setting these values, but then it does not know when your airplane will be overweight (and may assign too much payload) or how fast it is (and thus cannot estimate the time en route). Service Altitude can have any value, it just determines how high your airplane must be before the flight attendants start service. I encourage you to change the values, the process is described in section 5 (Configuring Aircraft) of the user manual.

Having said that, unless you made changes before, this PMDG plane should already have a proper config file ( FSCaptain\Aircraft\Overrides\PMDG 737-800NGX.cfg). It could be that PMDG made some internal changes to their models and that FSCaptain created a new configuration file instead. You can check if FSCaptain uses that file in the FCDU under "Display Info", where the file name is displayed in light blue.

Cheers,
Peter

[Travis]

MJL,

First, Peter is correct.  Those are default values which should indicate an item is "not yet configured."

Feel free to change those "-1" entries to valid ones (especially for "Cruise Speed") but it sounds as if your config file is wonky.

You could also delete the \Overrides\ configuration file and use the Administrator to create a new one from a known and trusted configuration file that you may have.

I will add a few paragraphs to the User Guide explaining what the reason for "-1" values are.
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It's a new year for most of us, so I'd like to start this one by thanking all of the Captains out there who post perfectly logical questions such as this - either here in the forum or in email.

Doing so gives us an insight into how our product and our documentation can be improved.

Always please ask us anything, no matter how trivial it might seem.  Many bugs have been fixed because of something that passes us by... and many features have been added or changed for the same reason.

With best regards,