Hi,
I have a specific question concerning removing stock airports from the sim and replacing them with 3rd party airports.
I have read mulitple questions and answers and didn’t see, I may have missed it (so if this has been answered already, I apologize), but I’m wondering since I am on PC now. I know some 3rd party add-ons say to remove the base airport, scenery, etc, while some don’t, would it be better even if it doesn’t state to remove the stock one for the sake of hard drive space and the smoothness of the sim?
I have a ton of add-on payware scenery and airports was thinking I could delete a lot of the base airports and scenery and some of the items that don’t matter to me from the world updates, etc and the sim would load faster and run a little cleaner.
Thoughts?
I’m not an expert here, but I assume that some add-on airports still rely on some of the base sim assets. So not every airport is a complete 100% replacement for the stock airport, it may just improve on certain things.
For example, I think I once read that some of the procedures, runways, ILS info, etc… is part of the airport. If the add-on doesn’t re-create all of that, you may lose it if you uninstall it.
Happy to be corrected here if that’s not the case.
As far as I am aware it’s not possible to delete “stock” airports, or scenery either for that matter and TBH I don’t think you’d gain any storage space as scenery is imported into the sim as you fly - it’s not already loaded.The only way to change anything is to use TP addons.
If storage is your problem, if you don’t already, why not use an addons manager? I keep all my addons on an external SSD and organise them through MSFS Addons Manager (see Flightsim.to). You are then able to choose what addons you want to use for a particular flight (you can set up profiles as well) which means there is not so much loaded int the game at startup, thus saving (a little) memory.
When I get a new airport, I just fire up the sim and see how it looks and works. If there’s a problem, the very first thing I do is to delete it and reload it because that’s been a problem before. But if the issue persists, I look for a 3rd party airport that I probably downloaded from flightsim and remove that. And if that doesn’t work, I go into Content Manager and see what might be there (to address your question).
BTW, usually when I have ‘competing’ addons, the problem manifests itself with uneven surfaces. When I see that, then I know that something’s wrong.
And Terry is right about using MSFS Addons Manager. I have my addons separated by location, so if something odd does happen, I can go right to that specific location to see if something else could be interfering with it. That has to be one of the more indespendible tools out there.