Surface Base Lone Star 2060 - Earth Terrain & Aerospace Infrastructure

[Carmen A]

"Lone Star 2060"

[ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=5103"]Houston airspace now available at Orbit Hangar[/ame]

More screenshots here

Supplementary airports:

West Houston airport by AtomicDryad
Norwich International Airport by Jangofett287​

Coming Soon:

San Francisco International Airport upgrade
Houston Aerospace scenario pack
Matagorda - Port Arthur Terrain expansion​

Basic Concept (as posted on February 14 2011)

It started from an conversation about threatening to land an XR5 atop the multiplayer server operator's house or something but stumbling upon this web page about abandoned and unknown Texas airfields alerted me to the heritage of these sites.

I hunted in Google Maps for some of these bases (several have been built over already and cannot be realistically used for OMP bases) and found some county airports with 5000ft runways that are quite easy to make.

I wanted something tinier to play with a base of my own first, though, and decided on Clark Sky Ranch outside Sealy as my first custom base.

I want to cover a relatively large landscape with the base textures so I will keep the textures low res; I find having a giant 2048x texture is not very worthwhile because I don't spent a lot of time looking at the ground at all. I will rather have something like FS98 or an earlier flight sim that allows me to recognise Texan landmarks, cities, etc, without any drag on the GPU/memory at all.

As we know, these bases are built for OMP (the first of many to come) and hi res texture packs are known to cause instabilities in our application, therefore maximum framerates and tiny install sizes are paramount to cater to everyone.

These bases I'm creating have a little surprise too - they are "realistically" sized, even the little light aircraft runways so taking off and landing a DG from a 1500ft runway is going to be as fun as the real thing - make use of the glideslope indicators or else!

 

[deltawing777]

coolness!

 

[n122vu]

Nice! Would need to use retro engines as thrust reversers, I assume?

 

[Carmen A]

Nice! Would need to use retro engines as thrust reversers, I assume?

Flaps, spoilers, retros, hooks, nets, boots scraping on the ground, the works

It's very good STOL practise... especially with cargo loaded.

I read that UCGO can simulate production facilities. If so, I could eventually create a fictional Texan farming economy!

Musn't forget the SAM sites too, for the rednecks amongst us :3 Never know when some rival NASCAR fans would pitch an XR5 container at us with their HARP cannon, y'know? :3

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Could I make a request?? Matagorda Island is often overlooked. But it's nicely located along the Gulf coast, the government displaced many farmers to plop a runway and facilities there, only to abandon it later.

 

[Carmen A]

Currently the scope of the "Texas 2060" project encompasses Matagorda - Houston - Galveston.

From reading about other base projects I have a strategy to not only cover a huge area but keep the file sizes relatively tiny as well.

And yes I'm using your base tutorial for my first steps (STOL base) PhantomCruiser :3
http://orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=13639&highlight=Base+Construction+Tutorial

To enable me to cover as much ground as possible I will develop my own modus operandi and publish tutorials.

Part of the next stage involves using a more efficient means of texture management (no 1,000,000 texture tiles to put in cfgs!) and also developing a basic infrastructure for the virtual Texas - there will be monorail lines on major roads like Route 288, for instance.

And yes UCGO interstate traffic

 

[deltawing777]

Currently the scope of the "Texas 2060" project encompasses Matagorda - Houston - Galveston.

From reading about other base projects I have a strategy to not only cover a huge area but keep the file sizes relatively tiny as well.

And yes I'm using your base tutorial for my first steps (STOL base) PhantomCruiser :3
http://orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=13639&highlight=Base+Construction+Tutorial

To enable me to cover as much ground as possible I will develop my own modus operandi and publish tutorials.

Part of the next stage involves using a more efficient means of texture management (no 1,000,000 texture tiles to put in cfgs!) and also developing a basic infrastructure for the virtual Texas - there will be monorail lines on major roads like Route 288, for instance.

And yes UCGO interstate traffic

Wow carmen excellent ideas cant wait to see what you come up with.

---------- Post added at 08:11 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:56 AM ----------

Could I make a request?? Matagorda Island is often overlooked. But it's nicely located along the Gulf coast, the government displaced many farmers to plop a runway and facilities there, only to abandon it later.

Probrably not the best location in a hurricane zone :lol:

 

[Carmen A]

Can we get a Cessna 172 addon?

And a motorbike? I'm going to model Route 288 as a huuuuuuuuge runway. I'm not picky about my hogs, a Sportster will do

 

[deltawing777]

Can we get a Cessna 172 addon?

And a motorbike? I'm going to model Route 288 as a huuuuuuuuge runway. I'm not picky about my hogs, a Sportster will do

lol Sportster...for some reason steppenwolf comes to mind :thumbup:

 

[Carmen A]

Pictures time!

 

[deltawing777]

OOooo nice! That looks really really looks cool carmen! What is that populated area under your left wing? Just looky at all dem cows down der' lol

 

[Carmen A]

That's Katy :3

I might as well blitz the texture tiles for Houston and leave the base work for the next few days or whatever.

I don't think we have a road & freeway texture so... I'll make one!

 

[PhantomCruiser]

Awesome. Completely.

 

[Carmen A]

Downtown Houston

Feels like home now doesn't it? :3

Filesize - Sealy to Houston, 2 megabytes. Yes, two. When you zoom out or move away from the textured area, the texture will auto shrink thereby causing no lag globally.

 

[deltawing777]

hey, there's grandma's house!

 

[Carmen A]

I have an evil idea to race landspeeders down Katy freeway dodging UCGO cars :3

---------- Post added at 06:39 ---------- Previous post was at 04:48 ----------

DG-EX climbing out of William P Hobby Airport

F/A-22 on CAP

 

[Hielor]

You should totally make Downtown Houston as 3d buildings

 

[Urwumpe]

You should totally make Downtown Houston as 3d buildings

And include the Johnston Spaceflight Center nearby? :lol:

 

[Hielor]

And include the Johnston Spaceflight Center nearby? :lol:

Not necessary, it already exists: [ame="http://orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=468"]Johnson Space Centerv2[/ame]

 

[Urwumpe]

Not necessary, it already exists: Johnson Space Centerv2

Yes, but as separate base. :lol: