Freeware

Amidst the flood of paying work lately (and mind you, I’m not complaining), I’ve managed to squeeze in a few hours here and there to push the Heron’s Nest towards completion. There were two things left on my mental list that had to be checked off before I could move to final testing and installer: adding some more ground interest around the house, and putting in a steel staircase descending the hill to the float dock. Happily, item one is now complete. Here are a couple of shots of the cottage now that it’s been filled in with all vegetation and a flagstone walkway.

Item two, the steel staircase, is modeled, and I’m working on finishing the texturing for it. I’ll post shots once it’s ready.

Here’s a message I got from my friend Brad Allen while I was away on vacation. It looks like it’d be of special interest to any of you bush-flying nuts:

Return to Misty Moorings Coming Soon!

Misty Moorings, Inc was a website that focused on flying in the FSAddon Scenery package for FS2004 called “Misty Fjords. We have put together a new site that we will be launching on the 29th of January. We are putting the finishing touches on it right now. It’s name is “Return to Misty Moorings”. Our new site is for FSX and it uses the ORBX Full Terrain Experience scenery called “Pacific Fjords” as it’s base and uses freeware scenery objects in the scenery design projects.

We will be launching with over 30 scenery locations all with flight plans and what we call “Trip Tix” … or wave top and tree top flying instructions guiding folks through the beautiful Misty Fjords. It’s a fairly full service site, some fleet repaints (more to come later), a library of references on Misty Fjords (that we use for the flight seeing trips (Trip Tix). Full story lines for each of the locations … a gallery and pictures of each location. Each location has a map and a flight plan. We have a forum where the site can be discussed, etc. We also have missions ready for the launch.

As was the case with the older version of Misty Moorings,Inc … the new “Return to Misty Moorings” is totally a FREEWARE site (we got the silver AA award the last time we tried this!). (http://www.mistymoorings.com/ that’s the old site).

Just our gift to our friends in the flightsim world.

Sincerely,

Doug Linn
Misty Moorings, Inc
Return to Misty Moorings

Brad Allen
Return to Misty Moorings
Project Manager

Hello campers. I’ve been kinda busy this summer, and haven’t posted as often as I’d like. When I do post, some people have complained that all I talk about are payware addons. For sure, most of the products that catch my eye do tend to be of the pay-for-it variety, mostly because I like a lot of eye candy and advanced modeling, and those are difficult things to just give away. However, now and then I run across something that has the rare combination of being both ultra-high-quality and free. When that happens, it’s worth talking about.

A Pilatus from His Porkly Majesty

Maybe this is just a Sim-Outhouse phenomenon, but over on their forums Tim “Piglet” Conrad has achieved legendary status. Tim has an eye for the unusual, some mad modeling skills, and turns out FS aircraft lickety-split. Best of all, he makes his work freely available to the public. His latest is the Pilatus PC-7 trainer, a two-seater turboprop with some of the sleekest lines around.

In fact, there’s something really familiar in the shape of the PC-7. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but then it hit me: it looks a bit like a P-51D, minus the belly scoop. And of course, in place of the RR Merlin up front, the long nose is built to hold a P&W PT6A-20 turbine. Tim did his usual bang-up job on the exterior, and this version (2.0) also takes advantage of larger 2048-square texture sheets, giving it a much sharper look.

The interior is well turned-out, too. I’ve seen some shots of the cockpits of the real thing, and he reproduced the look admirably in the sim version. Performance is excellent–this is definitely the plane you want if you need to get someplace fast. It’ll cruise at 200KIAS easily. In fact, the only real problem I’ve encountered is getting it to slow down, which often requires slipping to get it down to flaps extension speed. Once even a notch of flaps are down, it becomes fairly docile and easy to land.

I really enjoy shooting across the PNW in this baby. In fact, I like it so much that I’ve already done a repaint for it in a snazzy checkerboard scheme. You can get the repaint from the freeware section of this site. To download the plane, go to Sim-Outhouse. I found it on page 5 of the “What’s New” section of their Warbirds Library. It will get progressively farther back in the rankings once more files are added, but keep at it until you find it. This plane is worth the search.

New Ways to Crash a Chopper

The other add-on that I’m in intrigued with is called “Helicopter Total Realism” (HTR). As the name indicates, it’s designed to add increased realism to helo flying. That’s probably a good thing if you’re a rotorhead. If, like me, you’re not well versed in flying choppers, this add-on provides a whole slew of new ways and reasons to come crashing to earth.

This isn’t a helicopter, it’s a bolt-on physics engine to give your existing helicopters more realistic behavior. To use it, you download the engine and install it, then hook up your existing choppers to use it by creating an HTR config file for the specific model. HTR comes with configs for the default Bell 206, Robinson R-22, and Augusta Westland ships, with others available for download.

I downloaded a config for my Cera Bell 412 to try it out. Right away, I noticed that it handled differently in flight. I was cruising above Emma Field X, minding my own business and doing some surveying, when the chopper began to pitch up. A warning dialog flashed on screen, telling me that I was experiencing a retreating blade stall. Like I said, I know doodly squat about chopper physics, so I wasn’t entirely sure of how to escape the situation. I ended up asking Wikipedia about it so I could educate myself, and now I have a better idea of what happened and how to avoid it in the future.

So if you’re looking to add some challenge to your eggbeater flying, and maybe learn a thing or two, I highly recommend giving HTR a shot.

I’ll cover it more in an upcoming blog post, but you probably know by now that Tim “Piglet” Conrad has released version 2.0 of his Pilatus PC-7 trainer. This is a really nice model with super sleek lines. It might just be my favorite Piglet plane yet. I like it so much that I spent a few hours last night repainting it in a sharp black-and-white checkerboard livery – based on a real-world paint job.

If you like it, feel free to download it in the Freeware section.

Enjoy!