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Primer: general operations

Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2011 11:32 am
by Keith Smith
FSEconomy is an environment that models:
- a persistent, worldwide fleet of aircraft (including location, fuel state, payload, and required maintenance programs)
- revenue from conducting charter/cargo operations
- revenue for aircraft owners for the rental of aircraft
- revenue for FBO owners for the ground crew fees associated with the execution of charter jobs, revenue from fuel and supply sales, revenue from conducting aircraft maintenance and repair

At a high level, FSE generates paid jobs between airports. A job is generally either carrying a paying passenger (which takes up seats on the aircraft), or is simply a cargo job (doesn't require seats but contributes to the payload). Pilots claim the jobs, execute the charters and are paid (virtually) at the completion of the job.

FSE allows people to form named groups. A group can own aircraft and facilities and can snap up charter jobs. Once a charter job has been claimed by a group, it's no longer available to the general public. The significance of this will be explained shortly.

As a pilot, you can own/lease an aircraft, you can rent an aircraft, or you can fly an aircraft that's owned/leased by one a group of which you are a member. If you own/lease an aircraft, you can fly the aircraft yourself, you can rent it out to other pilots.

Flying for a group vs flying for an individual:
There are two radically different ways of conducting flights on FSE. Any given hop will be flown will be considered as a group flight, or a flight for an individual. For individual flights, the pilot receives the proceeds from the charter, minus fuel, rental, and FBO expenses. For group flights, the pilot receives a fixed dollar amount for the flight (known in advance of the flight, of course). The GROUP covers all of the expenses associated with the flight.

Groups often have their own aircraft, and can even have jobs generated just for them which are never made available to the public (either by owning an FBO, or by renting a gate at an FBO).

As a pilot, you can decide between conducting group flights or individual flights on a per flight basis. Remember, the money you make on a group flight is fixed...the group pockets the rest (or absorbs the loss, if you've made some tragic charter decisions on the group flight), whereas the money you make on an individual flight is purely a function of how efficiently you can conduct the flight, and load it up with passenger/cargo.

Making money:
- it's common for new users to simply rent a plane, add ONE assignment and then conduct a flight. That's fine, however, it's much more likely that you're going to want to execute MULTIPLE charters at the same time. Take the time to add MULTIPLE jobs to your 'my flights' page and then execute them all at once. It can certainly become an interesting exercise to pack the plane with people and cargo (two separate things), maximizing your ability to make money in a given hour of flight.

- here's a sample scenario. You can rent a Baron (carries 5 pax) and fill it up with jobs for airport B and airport C. You fly from A to B, completing a portion of your charters. At airport B, you find more jobs that terminate at airport C and load your plane to the gills one more time. You land at airport C and pocket the cash from all the remaining jobs. Had you simply loaded up the plane at airport A with a plane full of people destined for airport C, you might have made less money.

How to get started:
- sign up for a forum account (http://fseforums.com)
- request an FSE account by posting in the Account Requests forum.
- once you receive your account activation email (usually within a few hours), sign in to the FSE site (http://www.fseconomy.com)
- read the 'Getting started' tutorial in the FSE forum
- at some point, you really SHOULD read the actual manual, too, it contains little important tidbits to help you get the most from this virtual world.

Re: Primer: general operations

Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2011 7:33 am
by Eugene Zaporozhets
Spent over an hour playing around with installation instructions for the X-plane plugin. The steps in the FSE user guide and forum are a bit outdated, so I wanted to bring up a few pointers for the new users like me.

First, the user guide link to the Python Interface plugin for X-plane isn't working. Another user (a mysterious coma24 :)) posted a working link: http://www.xpluginsdk.org/python_interf ... nloads.htm Note, that the current plugin version is 2.7 and not 2.5 like the user guide says.

Second, the user guide step 4 says "Now you should have a "PythonInterface25" folder in the "plugins" folder." That's incorrect, at least for the plugin version 2.7. I had to put "PythonInterfaceWin27.xpl" and "PythonInterface.ini" directly into "X-plane9\resourses\plugins" folder, not a subfolder.

Lastly, if after you complete all the installation steps, X-economy still does not appear in the X-plane plugins menu, you might have a missing DLL (which would show up as an error in the X-plane log.txt) I had to go to the Python 2.7.2 directory (usually C:\Program Files\Python27) and manually copy "python27.dll" located there to "windows\system32" folder. I now have the plugin version 2.72.01 working.

Re: Primer: general operations

Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 6:50 pm
by Ryan B
Is this the best setup?

The plugin seemed to be working for XP but I have those files in the pythonscripts folder.. Mid way through my session the app froze up.

Any ideas?

Re: Primer: general operations

Posted: Tue Apr 08, 2014 8:58 am
by Keith Smith
Contrary to my earlier post, the python interface itself can be installed as a normal plugin (an xpl file in the plugins folder), or it can be a 'fat' plugin with its own folder 'pythoninterface' that lives in the plugins folder. On my newer machine, I have python running as a fat plugin.

The FSE plugin itself lives under 'pytonscripts', also under the plugins folder.

Re: Primer: general operations

Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2016 11:23 am
by Hesynergy
Keith Smith wrote:FSEconomy...Making money:
- it's common for new users to simply rent a plane, add ONE assignment and then conduct a flight. That's fine, however, it's much more likely that you're going to want to execute MULTIPLE charters at the same time. Take the time to add MULTIPLE jobs to your 'my flights' page and then execute them all at once. It can certainly become an interesting exercise to pack the plane with people and cargo (two separate things), maximizing your ability to make money in a given hour of flight.

- here's a sample scenario. You can rent a Baron (carries 5 pax) and fill it up with jobs for airport B and airport C. You fly from A to B, completing a portion of your charters. At airport B, you find more jobs that terminate at airport C and load your plane to the gills one more time. You land at airport C and pocket the cash from all the remaining jobs. Had you simply loaded up the plane at airport A with a plane full of people destined for airport C, you might have made less money.
I would have done MANY more flights If I could use one of my highly desired and esteemed, PURCHASED aircraft, instead of the crappy FSX/P3d default aircraft to match what is available as a rental on any particular flight....

I Would love to be shown the error in my thinking!

Cheers,
Chas

Re: Primer: general operations

Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2016 12:02 pm
by Keith Smith
I just googled "FSE FSX aircraft mapping" and found this: https://sites.google.com/site/fseoperat ... aft-models

That looks like a solution.

Re: Primer: general operations

Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2016 5:32 pm
by Hesynergy
Keith Smith wrote:I just googled "FSE FSX aircraft mapping" and found this: https://sites.google.com/site/fseoperat ... aft-models

That looks like a solution.
Whattaguyyyyyyyy...

Thanks Keith!