MSFS 1950 - Historical Airports

Things are always simple when it’s Somebody Else™ doing the work.

1 Like

Yay! A wild Puffin appears! :smiley:

And oops - sorry, @PipsPriller. I didn’t realize there was a unique identifier on them, but it makes sense.

I really hope this takes off! (oops…I swear, unintentional pun!)

1 Like

Ah, great if you would give it a go! A whole new world will open up for you, doing developement for a flightsim. But it will be worth while! And I’m your first member of the test team!

Hi @PuffinFlight - thanks so much for picking up the tag.

I have had a look at OSM this morning and I think you are right; none of the arrows I have identified in the sim look to be tagged.

Very exciting that you might be venturing into something historical as well though! Will look forward to hearing more in due course.

Right you are and thanks for offering to test anything that comes out! Will start trying to understand what is involved this weekend and keep you posted.

No worries - this is what we are aiming for…

This is Beacon 24 on the Salt Lake City - Great Falls (SL-GF) Airway. The arrow points towards Beacon 25.

It turns out the original maps are all available online to it should be possible to work out the positions of the missing beacons - I think!

Given where this thread started, the routes also included intermediate landing fields, which are a whole other proposition.

3 Likes

Interesting Topic.
It’s funny as I have been thinking about something similar recently. Nice to see, that I’m not the onlyone with this kind of taste.

I enjoy the oldies amongst the aircraft and instead of only thinking about airports I thought it would be cool, if there were scenerypacks that change for example New York to it’s 1920s/30s/40s state… or even replace the automatically placed default buildings with counterparts of that era.

But of course… especially the size difference of the cities at these times doesn’t fit with the sateliteimages and I’m afraid that the demand for this type of addon is not high enough to justify the costs.

1 Like

Hi, I am also curious as to how much interest there might be in these kind of historical mods, esp as the number of historic aircraft grows.

The release of the JU52 has prompted the publication of some flight plans of historic routes for Europe and being able to replace European cities in the same way as you suggest for the US would also be cool.

Detailed Ordnance Survey maps exist for the UK at regular intervals from about 1840ish so at a really crude level, I wonder if you could replace the areas built up since, say, 1930 with terrain tiling that reproduced countryside instead? Plus removing motorways, new trunk roads, skyscrapers etc!

3 Likes

Might be able to work with bing map data streaming off so it uses the base crude old school type landclass data and textures. Not sure if it’s possible to edit the autogen to resemble more old timey stuff though as the autogen is all done by that blackshark AI thingy and I don’t think its open to modding like it was in older sims. If it was then I’m sure we’d be seeing mods to replace the office block farm buildings we get currently lol. Could do it with manually placing exclude areas and buildings by hand by that’d take forever.

A complete world overhaul would probably be too difficult to pull off I reckon. Best we can probably hope for is a mix of old and new, old timey nav aids and airports co-existing with the modern world.

Hey @Latka Was just wondering why you are not working on a 1970s treatment of NY with yellow cab AI traffic?!

1 Like

I picked up a 3D printed set of levers for the JU52 for my Honeycomb Bravo. I need to break those out and get involved in the JU! (I’m guessing the '39 version of that aircraft used the (radio navigation?) prior to the advent of “modern” VORs and stuff?

I’m really excited for all of this. I tend to lean towards the older 60s / 70s stuff, and this would give me a great excuse to push backwards into history!

Nice - afraid I am flying the poor thing on a HOTAS with three of each bound to one throttle lever etc (oh the shame!).

I love my Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS but it kinda struggles with multi-engine internal combustion engines. I’m flying Big Radials’ Grumman Goose a lot and I have left and right power bound to the two throttles, left and right prop bound to the little slider next to the big throttles and mixture 1 and 2 bound to a rocker switch.It works but isn’t really ideal. I’ve been tempted to by some extra Saitek or CH throttle units a fair few times over the years just to help with flying these birds. Would need a bunch of them for three or four engined ones though!

Oh I didn’t want to suggest this specifically for US cities. I’d love to see this treatment also for any cities all over the world of course.

1 Like

So, here’s one for @anon17491698 since he started this thread about historical airports… Decided to have a look for one the Intermediate Landing Fields that were interspersed between the beacons - not really airports as such but a bit closer than an arrow!

Sure enough “deep in remote Texas” we can still fly to Delaware Intermediate Landing Field. It really is in the middle of nowhere and yet the generator shed is still there and reproduced by Blackshark’s AI. The AI also puts a shack on the foundations of the single hanger. (The direction arrow is still there IRL but gets lost in the Bing texture).

Anyway, the co-ordinates if you want to take a look are 31.85488642600256, -104.5487628232669.

5 Likes

Still a lot to see and find. Brilliant!

1 Like

I find this very intriguing, great post!

2 Likes

Thanks both. In amongst all the debates about photogrammetry, I am fascinated that these features also exist in the sim, hiding in plain sight.

I realise that they fall into a Venn diagram that links my interests in archaeology, history, aviation and flight sim, with scenery modelling emerging as the fifth circle!

4 Likes

It always makes me chuckle when my (eclectic) interests intersect, sometimes in really unplanned ways!

I just installed Visual Studio (the programming environment from Microsoft) so that I could use some of the tools in the SDK to take a look at the actual SimVars and their values. I feel I may be on the edge of a very deep rabbit hole!

This developing project is really neat!

Always a joy! From what little I know, SimVars plus the SDK looks absolutely like a deep rabbit hole…do you know which part of the warren you are heading for first?

Feeling greatly encouraged by the support for this particular rabbit hole though! Am already beginning to think that with the right templates and 34 routes, this could become a really interesting collaborative project.

2 Likes