
The 212-story skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia - noyesno
https://twitter.com/liamosaur/status/1296305262144364544
======
chrismorgan
Is it morbid of me to wonder what happens if you fly a plane into such a
building in Flight Simulator? It just… sticks out so much that crashing into
it seems the obvious thing to try.

(Judging by
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhrGEdO88kE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhrGEdO88kE)
where someone eventually succeeds in landing on this building, it looks like
if you fail the screen just goes black at the point of impact, so no
interesting physics simulation.)

~~~
bitwize
Crashing into stuff is great fun and probably the first impulse of anyone
booting up a flight simulation program (especially kids) -- so much so that
flight simulation software was the target of a moral panic in 2001 after the
September 11 attacks were conducted by crashing real jets into buildings. Some
people began to think of flight sims as "terrorist training tools" and call
for them to be banned. That's probably why the screen simply went blank.

Previous versions would display a "cracked windshield" over the cockpit view
and the word "CRASH". Flight Simulator 5.0 would switch to an external view
and show your aircraft shattering into pieces. MFS2020 can simulate an
aircraft that was partially damaged after colliding with an obstacle, but a
catastrophic crash will just fade to black and pop up a message. Lame.

~~~
Wolfenstein98k
That's because a few of the terrorists actually used flight sim games to
"train" prior to the hijackings.

It wasn't _completely_ unfounded hysteria.

~~~
bitwize
True, but at the time, anyone who wanted to fly a plane (for recreation,
commercially, etc.) would be likely to use a flight sim as an inexpensive
starting point for training or practice, and that's not even counting the
people who might never step into a cockpit, but enjoy flight sims regardless.
Terrorism was a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the use cases for flight
simulators.

And when this happened, the dust had just settled on a big nontroversy over
the role of first-person shooters in real-life shootings -- arguably, a
stronger case can be built for restrictions on those (for example, not
allowing them to be sold to small children) than for restrictions on civilian
flight sims.

~~~
ceejayoz
Flight sims are a lot more useful than FPSes for training.

My first flight hour was an ILS approach in a King Air. Supervised, for sure,
but the owner was rather shocked I could navigate and follow glide slope
without any actual time in the air.

The same is not true for a FPS.

------
BitwiseFool
Kinda looks like 432 Park Avenue!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue)

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GekkePrutser
Good to see OSM being actively used though.. I really love that project. And
the maps, at least here locally, are of amazing quality. When I'm hiking, on
Google and Apple maps I'm walking in a grey square. OSM has the tiniest
mountain trails. Love it.

And mistakes do happen, hope this one would get corrected though :) And it's
not the only one of its kind! Many are seen all around the world.

~~~
testrun
According to that twitter feed, it has been already corrected in OSM.

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afandian
The ridiculousness of this brought unexpected joy. It reminded me of the The
Centrifuge Brain Project.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVeHxUVkW4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVeHxUVkW4w)

~~~
phaedrus
It's like something The Culture might produce on a GSV that's gone Eccentric
and the crew just goes along with it.

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adaisadais
I love the concept of massive buildings / structures in areas without such but
I don’t think the city people would enjoy such buildings in actuality.

The massive circular mine in Russia comes to mind (no pun intended).

~~~
eliaspro
Next to the medieval town of Rottweil in southwestern Germany, there's the
246m tall thyssenkrupp tower.

[https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Remote_views_o...](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Remote_views_of_Thyssenkrupp-
Testturm#/media/File%3ARottweil_Hochbr%C3%BCcke_Aufzugsturm.jpg)

It was built a few years ago as test facility for elevators, but has also
become wow a touristic attraction as it offers a publicly accessible platform.

~~~
cydonian_monk
That's actually a rather nice looking building. I suspect if something was
built here in the States for a similar purpose, not only would it not have
such an attractive exterior, but it almost certainly wouldn't have public
access. Most of our office skyscrapers aren't even open to the public as it
is.

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Balgair
Aside: One of the best FSX posters out there is AirForceProud95. He's what got
me into flight sims, at least for a little while. A good compilation here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8E3SyMbaSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8E3SyMbaSk)

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java-man
Did Microsoft credit Open Street Map?

~~~
ceejayoz
It looks like OSM credits _Microsoft_ for a lot of that data.

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Microsoft_Building_Footp...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Microsoft_Building_Footprint_Data)

~~~
rmc
That data has not been imported into OSM. That's just a wiki page detailing
the external data.

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dwd
As an aside, I was curious how on a few of the trailers they feature out of
all the places in the world - Warrnambool (Victoria).

Given, it's a picturesque place (having grown up and gone to school there),
but maybe not as interesting as say a low level flyby of the 12 Apostles about
10min flight time back along the coast.

Was there a competition to get your town in the trailer, or one of the
developers grew up there and slipped it in?

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52-6F-62
Oh that's too funny.

On a side note: I signed up for the discounted $1 trial month of Xbox Game
Pass just to try this game out. The download and installation process was
ridiculously slow and causing my CPU to ramp up to 80-100° even while
undervolting it. On a brand new i7 9750. Not sure what that was all about. I
put the process on pause... I am looking forward to giving it a try, though.
Anyone else have any difficulties?

~~~
naavis
I also had a weird issue where minimizing the Flight Simulator window during
the download/installation procedure bumped GPU usage to 55 % on a GTX 1070
until unminimizing the window again. GPU usage was hovering around 5-10% when
the window was not minimized.

~~~
tpmx
I got that too. Generalized - this is a consistent theme across the game. All
sorts of random buggy behavior. Stick a USB input device into the PC while the
game is running - it may well crash.

I recognize these kinds of bugs. They come from the developers _not_ having a
bottom-up understanding of the platforms they are working on. Instead they are
working from the easiest possible code path and then try their best to squash
all of the bugs, without really understanding the fundamentals.

~~~
naavis
I was able to crash the game once by turning on my Steam controller while the
game was running. Couldn’t reproduce it though.

~~~
tpmx
Just found my 3-month-old post where I posted a cautious note against the
hype:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23133623](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23133623)

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xwdv
The article says it's impossibly narrow but is it really? It's only about 2.5
times taller than 432 Park Avenue in New York, but it also looks a little bit
wider.

A building like this would probably sway a bit more than usual at the top due
to being so tall and having no other wind breakers around it, but I imagine it
could be possible to build and live in safely.

~~~
rtkwe
It's taller (assuming just 10 feet per floor) than the Burg Khalifa. Super
tall structures require a far larger base to support against winds, as you go
up winds get faster and their leverage against the base increases.

~~~
spuz
10ft per floor would make it 2120ft or 646m tall. The Burj Khalifa is 829m
tall.

~~~
rtkwe
I was looking at the top floor height by accident, the last 200 feet or so are
a tower. It's a common cheat in the fight to be the world's tallest building,
build pretty tall then slap a bunch of floors or a tower on top that people
can't get into.

[https://qz.com/122356/44-out-of-72-of-the-worlds-tallest-
bui...](https://qz.com/122356/44-out-of-72-of-the-worlds-tallest-buildings-
are-cheating/)

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rwmj
Now I'm wondering if in engineering terms such a tall, thin building could be
constructed.

~~~
ceejayoz
No one's gone _quite_ that big, but this one's similarly tall and skinny, and
~100 stories.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue)

~~~
jaypeg25
The 57th St Tower (still being built I think) is slightly taller and even
skinnier - and just as ugly. Really I think it detracts from the beauty of
Central Park.

~~~
jdpink
The skyscrapers are what makes Central Park unique. There are millions of
acres of parkland around the world. There is only one place where a park is
surrounded by the most iconic skyline in the world. That contrast between the
urban and the "natural" (there's little to no true wilderness in Central Park)
is what makes it beautiful to me.

~~~
bluthru
These supertalls are adding significant shadows to Central Park:
[https://www.westsiderag.com/2018/11/11/billionaire-
shadows-n...](https://www.westsiderag.com/2018/11/11/billionaire-shadows-now-
creeping-across-central-park-olmsted-and-vaux-would-not-be-happy)

~~~
cborg
I'm not sure I'd say "significant".

>This means that the lasting shadow coverage will be relatively faint. On the
winter solstice, the longest edge of the passing shadows cast from these
buildings is estimated to last one hour.

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/21/upshot/Mappin...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/21/upshot/Mapping-
the-Shadows-of-New-York-City.html)

~~~
bluthru
>one hour

They're at the southern end of Central Park, which means that one hour is
lunch hour.

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ipnon
I hope they keep the building or make it an option. This is the sort of
creativity that seems to only happen by accident. It makes the game better for
some people, they enjoy the fun backstory and challenge of navigating around
and landing on it.

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carabiner
Let me remind all citizens of the dangers of magical thinking.

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growlist
I really think this should now be built.

~~~
dwd
There have been ideas for a similar tower for decades.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grollo_Tower](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grollo_Tower)

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tus88
There is something much funnier happening in Melbourne right now :D

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screpy
LOL! Always remember to sanitise your data:
[https://twitter.com/liamosaur/status/1296305262144364544](https://twitter.com/liamosaur/status/1296305262144364544)

