Mission Planner Heartbeat SITL error

I am running Mission Planner on a Predator PH315-54 laptop and am running into issues with getting the simulator to run correctly.

When trying to start the simulator I get a “connecting mavlink” pop up that times out and eventually says, “No heartbeat packets recieved.”

We have no interest in actually connecting to an autopilot system/aircraft, we are only trying to use the simulator tab to see if the missions theoretically make sense.

I have no dev background, and all the solutions I can seem to find involve either the dev side of things or an actual autopilot/aircraft connection issue. I am just an operator working on practical mission planning skills.

Does anyone know a fix for this?

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling, I have walked through youtube videos of running the simulator and seem to follow all the steps and have all the setting correct that I can see at least…