Originally posted by Krusty
While a hilarious write-up it's inaccurate. Above a certain altitude you cannot see the earth (haze kicks in). Above 95k your plane disappears for some reason (but it still there, descending to below 95k makes it reappear).
You can test this yourself offline with wind updraft and a lot of free time.
I haven't tried for an alt record in AH2, but in AH1 it used to be as Rolex said. Your plane never disappeared and you never got away from seeing a white ball down there somewhere, although it got VERY small sometimes if you were WAY up there. Another thing in AH1 was what we called the 75k Speedbump. When you reached that alt, the flight model had a glitch that suddenly slammed your TAS down to match your IAS. This was a big enough bump to kill you sometimes, and it almost always blacked you out if you were going straight up at 600+ TAS in a 163 when this happened
. Of course, with the TAS much lower than it should have been, your ROC dropped a lot at this point and never recovered. This put 100k out of reach for a 163 starting at 0 ASL with normal fuel burn. Of course, at the 2nd AH Con when they 1st appeared, we had practically unlimited fuel for the Evil Mission, so got up above 150k before getting bored.
