The 748 heads west

[speedbird591]

There's nothing better on a wet day off than to re-acquaint yourself with an old friend. And what a nice surprise to find a Cascade Airways livery with it. It makes a perfect sister aircraft for the 1-11 and they can both be based in Spokane and fly around the Pacific North West. This is Hobby Field at Creswell, south of Portland, Oregon. It's only just big enough to get the 748 in, but that's enough for me







The last shot illustrates the shading issue with FS9 aircraft in P3D.

Ian

[speedbird591]

ORBX often give you a bonus airstrip with a payware airport. This one is Walker, about five miles from Cresswell but isn't suitable for the budgie so I've borrowed something more sensible. It looks like lunch is cooking.



Ian

[TSR2]

Lovely shots Ian. I still reckon you could get a Budgie into Walker

[speedbird591]

Lovely shots Ian. I still reckon you could get a Budgie into Walker

Yeah! Course I can! I just needed encouragement





You never mentioned stopping I'm going to need those tractors to get me out of the potato field.



Ian

[hobby]

748 acft are perfectly capable of dealing with rough strips. One area of Martlesham was ploughed up to test the capability of the aircraft to take off from such a surface. Acft probably unable to deal with waterlogged ploughed fields!

[Charlie Hotel]

I am stunned by the quality of the graphics... Those shots of the trailers and shacks and rusty old tractors are amazing! This is P3D right? Looks like it's time to retire my trusty, time worn FS9 and take a closer look at this.

There are even flowers ffs!!!

[speedbird591]

There are even flowers ffs!!!

At some airports there are moving people, birds, dogs, ducks, cattle, horses and fluttering butterflies

The scenery is FTX by ORBX http://fullterrain.com/. At the moment that covers the whole of Australia and NZ and a large swathe of NW USA, including BC and some of Alaska. Europe is coming soon with England due to be released in a few weeks. You buy the area and the sort of detail you see in the pics comes when you buy add-on airports.

The scenery is for FSX and/or P3D. Mine is installed in FSX and linked to from P3D. You'd see the same picture quality in FSX. It's not as difficult to run as you'd think. If you have a machine that runs FSX comfortably it will cope with FTX and there are free demo areas and airports to try out before you buy.

So to get graphics like that you'd need a moderately good PC with a good monitor/screen and FSX. Glad you like the pics!

Ian

[Charlie Hotel]

The Budgie looks fantastic too - is that the original FS9 model by Rick Piper?

Really - looking at shots like these make me want to sell the first-born and get a seriously good PC set-up !!!

[Garry Russell]

There has not been an upgrade of the 748, that is the one from a few years back.

[speedbird591]

Yes, it's Rick's Budgie - available from the library here with an FSX installer. But be aware that there are 'disappointments' in moving deeply loved FS9 aircraft away from their home! As we've seen elsewhere on the forum recently. Fewer parts work the further you move them (i.e. to FSX and then further to P3D). As Ben says, you need to first decide what and where you want to fly before you choose your sim. If you're serious about flying FS9 aircraft you should keep FS9 for them, whatever else you do. However, virtually all FSX aircraft will work in the current version of P3D; although installing them can involve some trickery As an example, in P3D, we're finding that the VCs of many FS9 aircraft have lost the functionality of some panels/switches, although they work fine in 2D. So the basic rule if you must have full aircraft functionality is to fly an aircraft in the sim it was designed for.

We all approach our simming differently and mine is quite casual. Being an important part of the history of classic British aviation ( ) that's what I prefer to fly, but I also like the newer sims/scenery and the choice of British aircraft reduces as you move further away from FS9 so I find myself flying more classic American aircraft as they work better in my simming environment. Of course, there's no reason you can't run two or three sims side by side - there are plenty here who do.

My own decision, in the interest of simplification, is to use P3D exclusively for my simming. I do have FSX installed but I only use it as a storage facility for some scenery packages. To make this move, I bought a new laptop, following Ben's advice, and then went with a new install of P3D and ORBX/FTX scenery. So my simming is intentionally limited to what works in this environment but as you can see, it works very well. But please be aware of the restrictions that this approach imposes on you!

And it's not that cheap, either. Apart from a fairly well-specced machine, the FTX scenery can soon add up if you start adding several airports. And they're very difficult to resist! And that's without P3D and REX! If you want any more details about my set-up please feel free to PM me. You'll also find several other threads of mine with pics and videos of this scenery in P3D - mostly in the Payware Heads Up section.

Cheers

Ian