Ahmed Al Jaber

[falcon409]

Yea, I know. . .why don't ya finish what you started first. . .Well, this one is one I wanted to do a long time ago and didn't have what I needed, now I do and It's moving along pretty well. Most of this is from memory and with the help of the satellite imagery, which is pretty good, it's been pretty easy thus far.

What will take a bit longer is populating the outlying areas, back where the Chow Hall, Expandables, Tent City and the Admin Buildings are, plus a lot of generic stuff around the base to at least give it a sense of completion.

[Railrunner130]

I only went there twice-- broke once but luckily we got out the same day. That was a really busy place.

[falcon409]

I only went there twice-- broke once but luckily we got out the same day. That was a really busy place.
Yea, I thought it sucked when I first got there. I spent two years in Africa when I was active duty, but at least we had the Med right there to cool off in, lol. This place is in the middle of a huggggggge sand box, lol. After a few weeks, I got accustomed to it and from there on. . .piece a cake.:salute:

[falcon409]

I decided to actually try ADE after hearing enough folks talk about how versatile it was. I had always thought (obviously I was wrong) that you could place generic buildings/objects onto your airport using it, nope you can't. You can move buildings that are already there, or you can import a building from another airport, but you can't create a building (as you can with Autogen Annotator) using a placement poly. I was hoping I could use ADE to place the generic buildings around the base rather than doing it using Instant Scenery, but it looks like that's the only way.:banghead:

[JensOle]

Looks good!

Should be a nice place for my KAF "Bug" repaints :)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/JensOle/Arab/Scrshot1492.jpg

[falcon409]

Yep, your repaints in an earlier post actually got me thinking about trying this again JensOle. I really thought it was kinda funny the first time I drove onto the line at Al Jaber and saw the F-18's. . .I thought, "of all the Fighter's they could have selected for their AF. . .why in the world would they choose a "Carrier Based Aircraft" in the middle of the desert? lol.

The funniest thing about them was that, at the time I was there (2001-2002) they were strictly for training only. They weren't loaded with anything, basically clean aircraft and they only flew a couple of em' each day, lol.

[JensOle]

Yeah, many of the countries down there are really paper tigers when it comes to military capabilities...they got a lot of hardware, but their actual use are rather limited.

As for the KAF to choose the Hornet it was probably because they were happy with their Mc.D. Skyhawks and that the Hornet was the logical next step from the same company, not to forget that the Hornet did good in the 91 war.

My research for the KAF bugs showed little external loadout, so I kept them clean except for a few tanks on the delta bug in the screenshots.

Regards
Jens-Ole

[TeaSea]

Al Jabar!!!

A blast from my past....although I spent most of my time on the rock at Ali Al Saleem.

[falcon409]

Al Jabar!!!
A blast from my past....although I spent most of my time on the rock at Ali Al Saleem.
Yep, same place my son visited last year. He's an AF Medic and volunteered for guard duty, lol.

Here he is with his "Posse", lol, he's the second one in from the right:salute:

[MCDesigns]

I decided to actually try ADE after hearing enough folks talk about how versatile it was. I had always thought (obviously I was wrong) that you could place generic buildings/objects onto your airport using it, nope you can't. You can move buildings that are already there, or you can import a building from another airport, but you can't create a building (as you can with Autogen Annotator) using a placement poly. I was hoping I could use ADE to place the generic buildings around the base rather than doing it using Instant Scenery, but it looks like that's the only way.:banghead:

Sure you can add from the default libraries in ADE. Just right click, add, library object and you get this window.
5753

[NoNewMessages]

Of course to muddy the waters, a generic building is a term for FSX generated basic structures, whereas I think Falcon is talking about standardized library objects? Which ADE, IS or SBuilderX can place.

For generic buildings, which are most of the buildings in FSX, SbuilderX can place some of them, but not all IIRC. What will place generics is Whisplacer, which contains a nice windowed construction display, where you can see the object's textures as you make it. Then you just place it in FSX. Too bad Lamont Clark stopped developing his utilities, because I really was impressed with what he contributed.

If only one product handled all the work I could clear up a few utilities from my HD.

[falcon409]

Another WIP. I may need to scale this back a bit as it's becoming the same fps hog that NAS Fort Worth was and I finally dumped it. Anyone who does this on a regular basis, especially scenery for bases, knows that just sticking a bunch of building around the base to fill it up so it doesn't look so bare doesn't get it. Each base has a "look" to it and once you've seen that look, nothing else looks correct. I can lay a bunch of buildings out in the desert to populate the area and help fill it in, but they look out of place and just load down the fps hit.

Gonna sleep on it. . .maybe it'll come to me in a dream, lol.

[falcon409]

I've taken this as far as I'm going to go. There are over 500 objects in the scenery, the aircraft flightline is very accurate, anyone who was there for any length of time will recognize the layout. The area up around Tent City is close to what it was like when I was there. I believe Tent City has been replaced with hardened buildings now as was the "Expandables" area shown to the far right of that area. Many of the buildings on the base where shells, vacated after the Iraqi takeover and some were being demolished to make way for newer buildings.

I have one spot on the AFCAD which is a puzzle to me right now. You can see it in one of the images. It looks fine in AFX, but load the scenery and I get a rectangular break in the taxiway. I'm working on that now. I'm going to add some worker bees around the aircraft shelters, just to show some activity, and some AGE equipment at various spots near the aircraft, but beyond that, it's pretty much complete.