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Hi all,
I would like a short list of actions that I need to take so that I can install aircraft carriers designed for CFS2 into FS2004. Is this a simple ask or a very complicated ask?
Be nice to do it as some of the recent vessels for CFS2 look great.
Mal
Hi Mal,
Well if you want stationary, just ask the author to recompile the mdl into a Fs9 scenery bgl, then you can place it where you like. And/Or use TTools/AFcad etc to make it move where and when you want.
If you want moving and pilotable, just make a copy of a similar Fs9 pilotable ship you have, change ALL the name details in the various files ie. aircraft.cfg, airfile, model etc, to the new ship and place the CFS2 mdl into the model folder.
Cheers
Shessi
A couple years ago I was taught how to convert CFS-2 carriers to FS9 scenery objects, make a hard deck and put an airport there, add a wake and stack smoke and have carriers that can be flown to and from. It's a bit tedious but not terribly complicated. Alas, soon thereafter I got totally involved in an aircraft project and forgot much of what I learned!
I put some copies of CV-4 Ranger and CV-7 Wasp into Golden Wings to complete the set of pre-war carriers. Now I want to put some post-war straight deck CVs into my classic era sim, but I will need to retrain myself first, and these days I have absolutely no hobby time at all.
So I can't just write a quick set of instructions for you right now. (Maybe later, we'll see if the coming week will allow me any hobby time.) For now, I suggest that you grab a copy of the USS Wolverine that I put in the library and see if you can reverse engineer it. (Like I will have to do if I can ever get some hobby time again.) That will show you all the components and instruction in the little trick needed to start a flight from the ship. Hopefully you'll be able to see how the bits go together and be able to convert and place some carriers of your own.
Here's the Wolverine:
http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforum...d=109&id=23157
Good luck!
Thank you Mick,
for this very sound advice. I have spent many hours 'reverse engineering' a nice looking FS9 a/c models with very innacurate or just plain awful flight characteristics. Quite satisfying in its way. I am certainly not above the straight hi-jack of a really good flt model to a similar sized a/c.
Will start dissecting the WOLVERINE and see what is what. Thanks for pointing out to me what was really staring me in the face. I blame Admiral Alzheimer and his first shot across my bow.
Mal
Hi Mal,
Yep, that ol' admiral has been annoying me for a while too!
This much I recall:
The CFS2 ship becomes an FS9 AI aircraft. It needs an airport to park at. Make such an airport with just a minimal runway and one start location. Give it an ID and name that will never show up on your Select Airport menu to confuse you. I use identifiers starting with ZZ, like ZZAA, ZZAB and so on, so they're at the very bottom of the drop-down menu. Then set up a flight plan that puts your carrier (posing as an AI plane) in the desired spot with one weekly flight, just a takeoff and landing back at that same airport, so that the flight takes place in the middle of the night on a weeknight. That way, the ship will always be where you expect it to be at any time you're likely to be awake and flying in FS.
Once the ship is parked in place, put in wake and stack smoke effects. I find it much easier to align the wake with the ship if the ship and the wake are on a heading of zero (or 360) degrees.
OK, there's your carrier. Next you have to give it a hard deck. You do that by creating another airport with a runway that matches the carrier's flight deck, a start location near the fantail (or on a catapult if it's a modern carrier) and a field elevation the same as the elevation of the ship's flight deck over the water. I give that airport an ID and name that I will be able to find on the Select Airport Menu. For example, for CV-4 USS Ranger off NAS Quonset Point I might use something like C4QP, Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic, USS Ranger, Off Quonset Point.
Because the ship is an AI aircraft, if you try to start your flyable aircraft in the same location, the AI plane won't show up. The hard deck will always be there, but you'll find your flyable plane sitting in the air over the water and the wake, with the stack smoke appearing from a point up in the air. Just go into Slew mode, slew the plane to one side and refresh the Time & Season, and slew back onto the ship, which has appeared like magic. (Once it's there it won't go away.)
Once I got the hang of it I found that I could set up a carrier in an hour or so.
Two caveats:
First, it's been well over a year since I set up a ship this way, and I well may have forgotten something. As I mentioned, I have lots of big plans for adding some straight deck carriers to my Classic Era sim, but I just can't get any hobby time these days, so I haven't re-studied the process and got it down pat again yet.
Second, not every CFS2 ship works in this scheme. Some will crash FS9, some will just not appear, and at least one ship I tried, a very nice WW2 American seaplane tender, shows up but becomes invisible when looked at from certain angles, so it kept popping in and out of existence as my eyepoint changed as I flew around.
Good luck!
OK, I found some hobby time, retrained myself in how to do it, set up a couple carriers and wrote up my notes into a sort of tutorial.
It's not the "short list" that you asked for; it's actually a fairly long list of steps to take. None of them are difficult, though some are rather tedious.
You'll need to be familiar with some old utility programs: BGLcomp, Traffic Tools and AFCAD. I recommend AFCAD rather than ADE9X because ADE won't allow a runway width of less that four feet, which will prevent you from making the invisible runway that is needed for this operation.
I'm attaching my instructions here in a text file. Good luck!
If you find my instructions complete and have no trouble following them, maybe I'll zip them up and put them in the library for others to have. So please let me know if you find any typos, confusion or nonsense.