1) When it comes to ridge flying, that is something I approach with a lot of respect. Always gently test a ridge on any given day before going all in, always be aware of the violence that can occur there that you cannot feel in Condor.
Totally agree. I remember Bruno Vassel's video about his near death experiences with ridges.
2) Looking for traffic. There is a certain habit, or technique, to scanning for traffic that needs to happen subconsciously all the time. In Condor, that is not a factor ( I do not fly MP)
Honestly I have trouble enforcing this. One day I almost crashed into those damned aerostats that some sceneries have over certain airports. Embarrassing! If I ever make a crack scenery I'll scatter some glider models in the air. Too bad that Condor doesn't support scenery animations, else they'd move around the place too.
Real gliders I find easier to fly because the real stick has so much more travel and therefore fine-control over any PC flight stick.
I was having way too much trouble controlling and thermalling but it took a while until I found the culprit. The stick definitely has limited travel making fine adjustments tricky to the point of being limited by the granularity of the stick potentiometer! After changing non-linearity settings in condor to 50% for ailerons and elevator it finally clicked for me, it was as if my thermalling skills doubled overnight... The tradeoff is that you lose a bit of control towards the middle but that's less important than the low and high ends.
In Condor, try flying thermals too slow, and practice the proper reaction ( easy stick fwd, use rudder to kick the low wing up) - not a big deal IRL if the correct recovery reaction is automatic and intuitive !
Spin recovery excercises in the Cirrus are valuable too
I did loads of thermalling stalls when I started since I had nobody to actually teach me, so that at least is second nature by now. Back then I had no idea of the bank angle relation to stalling. Embarrassing ! And the cirrus is my fave by far, the tailplane makes it so easy to spin!
The only thing that Condor does "too well" and that could build false confidence is how reliable the lift is sometimes but to offset that,
I've read that condor is a bit too static like that so I always set high variability. I'm seeing lift/turbulence/alive air everywhere in gliding videos that I don't get in Condor, but I can imagine how hard it is to model the atmosphere. I'd like to have more control over the weather though because it's weird seeing the same conditions over 100's of km.
Thanks I will check them out!