> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.skyvexsoftware.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Pauses & Sim Disconnects

> What Stratos does when the simulator goes quiet mid-flight — when it bridges the gap silently, when it stops and waits for you, and how to get tracking moving again.

Simulators drop connections, freeze for a few seconds, and get reloaded mid-flight. Stratos does not treat every one of these the same way. It watches the position data itself and asks a single question: **is this still the same flight, continuously flown?** If yes, tracking carries on without you doing anything. If no, Stratos stops and waits for you to confirm what happened.

This page explains the two rules that decide "continuous," what a brief disconnect looks like from the cockpit, when tracking suspends instead, and how to get back into a suspended flight.

## What counts as continuous

Whenever the data stream returns after a gap — a dropped socket, a spell in the sim's menu, a reload — Stratos compares where the aircraft is now against where it was last seen and applies two rules:

* **Distance.** If the aircraft is within **2 nautical miles** of where tracking last saw it, the gap is continuous regardless of how long it took.
* **Plausible speed.** If it moved further than that, Stratos checks whether the distance covered is consistent with the aircraft actually having flown there in the time that elapsed. A dropout that resumes 100 nm along the same route at a believable ground speed is still continuous — the aircraft simply kept flying while the connection was down.

If neither rule is satisfied — the aircraft reappears somewhere the elapsed time could not explain, such as a different airport, or a save was reloaded — the gap is a **discontinuity**, and tracking suspends rather than carrying on.

## Brief disconnects

Most gaps are brief and continuous: a watchdog stall, a few seconds of stutter, a short SimConnect hiccup. When one of these happens:

* Stratos shows a **warning toast**, and while it waits, a **Waiting for the simulator** dialog with a spinner is shown — there is nothing to do here, just wait.
* Once frames come back and pass the continuity check, the dialog closes itself and tracking continues automatically.
* Only the distance you actually flew counts toward flight time. The gap itself is folded into paused time, not credited as time in the air, so a stall or brief dropout does not inflate your block or air time.

## When tracking suspends

Tracking suspends — stops and waits for you — when the gap is a discontinuity rather than a brief bridge. That happens when:

* The simulator comes back — after a disconnect, or after more than **5 seconds** in the menu or world map — somewhere implausible for the time elapsed, or parked on the ground after it was flying.
* The aircraft's position jumps mid-flight even though the simulator connection never dropped.

When any of these fire, Stratos pauses the flight, plays the error sound, raises a **Tracking suspended** notification, and shows the **Simulator Disconnected** dialog. Unlike a brief disconnect, a suspended flight does **not** resume on its own — this is deliberate. It is exactly the case that used to let a reloaded save or a fresh sim flight silently continue tracking from the wrong position and produce a corrupted PIREP.

## Getting back

To clear a suspended flight, get the aircraft back to where tracking left off — either by loading your save or by using **Auto Reposition** if your simulator supports it. The dialog polls your simulator's current position and compares it against the last known point:

* Once you are within **2 nm** of where tracking stopped, the dialog turns green and shows **"Back at last known position."** Resume is then a single click. This needs a live position: while you sit in the sim's menu the simulator reports nothing new, so the dialog keeps showing the drift until the aircraft is loaded and reporting again.
* Further away, the dialog keeps showing the drift so you know how far off you are, along with the Auto Reposition option where available.

## Pause vs suspend

Pause and suspend look similar — both stop the flight — but they mean different things:

* **Pause** is something you choose. Pressing Pause also pauses the simulator itself.
* **Suspend** is something Stratos decides, in response to a discontinuity it cannot silently absorb.

The two can overlap. If you press Pause while a gap is still bridging, Stratos honours it: when the simulator reconnects, Stratos re-pauses the sim on your behalf and holds it there until you press Resume — your pause is not overwritten by the gap resolving underneath it. And whether you paused manually or Stratos suspended the flight for you, the rule is the same: a suspended flight never resumes on its own. Only pressing Resume clears it.