"Miss Helen" Over Southern England
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Thread: "Miss Helen" Over Southern England

  1. #1

    "Miss Helen" Over Southern England

    Here are some screenshots I liked from a flight in the Duxford-based P-51D "Miss Helen", from Headcorn down around the south eastern coast of England and landing at Goodwood. The scenery is ORBX's True Earth England. Screenshots taken from P3DV4.5.










  2. #2

  3. #3
    A great set of shots mate
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  4. #4
    Nice, John!
    Greenhouse357

  5. #5
    Thank you guys!

    I've long been an admirer of the real/restored "Miss Helen" (G-BIXL), ever since growing up watching, on repeat, a taped version of the History Channel's "Battle Stations" documentary on the P-51, which featured a lot of great footage of the aircraft. For the past several years now the aircraft has been owned by a (very) distant relation, named Robert Tyrrell, who has one of the older English spellings of my last name (the spelling changed in my family tree back in the 1500's while still living in England/prior to coming to Virginia in 1656, but it all goes back to the same original roots).

    Here are some screenshots of "Miss Helen" around Duxford, where the aircraft is currently based, and around the Manor Farm private airfield in East Garston where it was based when owned by Robs Lamplough (quite a fun field to operate a Mustang in/out of).










  6. #6
    Some late evening shots around Berkshire, near East Garston.












  7. #7
    Beautiful shots, John. What's your opinion of the Orbx true earth for P3D? I've been on the fence but your screens are tempting me.

  8. #8
    a
    round the Manor Farm private airfield in East Garston where it was based when owned by Robs Lamplough (quite a fun field to operate a Mustang in/out of).


    I have met Robs Lamplough and we shared a pit lane garage at Silverstone doing historic racing. Didn't know he was a warbird aviator as well. The two go together. What is the runway length of the Manor Farm airfield out of curiosity?
    Striker, listen, and you listen close: flying a plane is no different than riding a bicycle, just a lot harder to put baseball cards in the spokes.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by c87 View Post
    Beautiful shots, John. What's your opinion of the Orbx true earth for P3D? I've been on the fence but your screens are tempting me.
    I've only had the scenery since Saturday, so I've just only begun exploring, but I've been absolutely loving it. I really like the accurate coloring and the amount and vast variety of autogen trees and buildings, and so precisely positioned (the variety in the tree types and heights, and how accurate they are, also has greatly impressed me). I held off for quite some time as I knew my previous computer wouldn't be able to handle it, at least not with max autogen (and having already been using the FTX England scenery). I recently bought a new system with an i9-9900K and RTX 2080, so I figured I'd have as good a chance as just about any of running the scenery well. I have all the main scenery settings at max, including autogen, and average about mid 50's to 60's in frame rates (but keep them capped at 30). I've always owned all of the past UK VFR/Gen X photo sceneries, for FSX and FS2004 before it, and this of course far far exceeds those previous products. The only issue I've found with the scenery is a couple of lighthouse locations, such as Beachy Head, where there are two lighthouses showing when there should only be one (I'm planning on documenting these and any others I spot and post about it at the ORBX support forum). With FS2020 on my mind so much as of late, and so highly anticipating that sim, I felt that this scenery offered the closest possible experience in P3D to what the incredible scenery in FS2020 is like, and would hold me over for the time being until FS2020 is released.

    One of my favorite aspects of scenery like this is being able to locate and utilize airfields that are not listed/established airports, and therefore would otherwise not be present in any other scenery - like the Manor Farm airfield I illustrated above, which won't show on any GPS or airport listing, you just have to know about it and where it is located through word of mouth or other resources. The terrain mesh is also very accurate/highly detailed - in the case of operating out of the Manor Farm airfield, which is just the base scenery, it has all of the correct slopes/contours of the land and all very finessed/high definition.

    I like too how at all of the airports they allow the photo scenery to remain as the base of the airport, so all of the airports really blend in naturally with their surroundings. As just one example, here is Fowlmere (no big green polygon base):



    One of the other awesome aspects I've found with the True Earth Great Britain scenery is that there are some warbirds I like to fly that are based at Sywell, and when I was using ORBX's FTX England, there was a big swath of very tall trees at the north end of the main runway, and very close to the runway, which is not the case in reality and would make approaches from the north difficult and not accurate. With the True Earth scenery, the tree line is now accurate to life, and the height of the trees is also accurate, allowing standard type approaches into Sywell from the north just as they should be/are in real life.

    I added the amazing freeware FSX Duxford scenery (but with all of the base elements removed), and combined it with the True Earth Duxford airport files, to produce a version that blends right in with the True Earth scenery, and I think just looks awesome (especially with all of the vivid/true to life colors/not washed out). With the True Earth scenery, you can see traces in the fields of some of the original WWII perimeter track that is now gone (during WWII, Duxford had such a wide runway that it was the only airfield in England that could have 8 airplanes takeoff at the same time, line abreast).







  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by expat View Post
    I have met Robs Lamplough and we shared a pit lane garage at Silverstone doing historic racing. Didn't know he was a warbird aviator as well. The two go together. What is the runway length of the Manor Farm airfield out of curiosity?
    The runway appears to be about 2,200 ft perhaps. It runs mainly east/west, and slopes upward to the west - offering some help slowing the aircraft down by landing from the east, and helping launch the aircraft by taking off towards the east. Using 55-in MP (max Merlin power setting running 100 low-lead), and 10-degrees of flaps, I had no problem taking off to the east (downward run), and had no problem coming to a stop landing from the east, uphill, by making a 90-kts 3-point landing.

    The Spanish Civil War combat-vet early Bf-109E that has been under restoration at MeierMotors in Germany, to fly, was sent there for restoration by Robs Lamplough, though I don't know if he is still the owner or not. Robs has owned a number of interesting aircraft, including Spitfire Mk.VIII MV154 (which he sold in 2010), a Buchon for a time back in the 80's, and a Fokker Dr.1 which he still owns.

    Here is a great video of "Miss Helen" operating from Manor Farm, from several years back, when still owned by Robs Lamplough:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akj68vjgFYg

  11. #11
    Great comprehensive report on your experience with true earth, John. Thank you. I'm wondering if my gtx1080 and i7-8700k will handle it. Guess I'll just have to dive in and see.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by expat View Post
    a

    I have met Robs Lamplough and we shared a pit lane garage at Silverstone doing historic racing. Didn't know he was a warbird aviator as well. The two go together. What is the runway length of the Manor Farm airfield out of curiosity?
    And he certainly has owned and raced some exotic cars!
    "Illegitimum non carborundum".

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  13. #13
    C87 -

    I'm wondering if my gtx1080 and i7-8700k will handle it.
    I'm running P3Dv4 on a system which has an AMD FX 8300 processor with a GeForce GTX 1050ti. Most of my flying is low and slow, around 2,500', and apart from big city areas it handles TEGB pretty well, with frs usually in the 20s. It's a huge step forward from EU England. For the first time serious visual navigation is possible, and I have been able to use Google Earth to pinpoint my position.

    John -

    I added the amazing freeware FSX Duxford scenery (but with all of the base elements removed), and combined it with the True Earth Duxford
    Could you elaborate on this, please?

    David
    Rats - why won't anything work properly first time?

  14. #14
    With the ACG FSX IWM Duxford scenery, I added it just as you would in FSX, activated in the P3D Scenery Library above the ORBX scenery. I removed a bunch of the Duxford .bgl scenery files that don't mesh well, and added two .bgl files from the ORBX True Earth GB scenery to the ACG IWM Duxford folder - those being "ADE_FTX_GBS_EGSU.bgl" and "ADE_FTX_GBS_EGSU_CVX.bgl" from the FTX_EU_!GBSII_05_SCENERY folder (within your ORBX scenery folder).

    In addition, I've personally modified the ORBX ADE_FTX_GBS_EGSU.bgl file, which I've renamed as "Modded" - using the freeware ADE (Airport Design Editor) software, I removed all of the perimeter fencing from the ORBX Duxford file.

    I like the results, but it isn't perfect. Make sure to backup all of your files! (Also, I've reduced the amount of the AI warbirds to what can normally be expected to be seen out and about at Duxford on a regular day.)

    This is how my Duxford scenery folder looks after the changes:
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Dux_Scenery.jpg  

  15. #15
    Thank you. I'll give that a try. So basically it is using the Duxford scenery but with the TEGB files instead of the ACG where there are duplicates.
    Rats - why won't anything work properly first time?

  16. #16
    Thanks for this pointer Bomber!

    Tried it out and it works like a charm. No more flickering textures like with the original release of Duxford and the added Beauty of TEGB!

    Cheers,

    Priller

  17. #17

    "Contrary Mary" Over Woodchurch

    Some screenshots from another recent flight, this time visiting Rob Davies' private farm strip airfield in Woodchurch, with the TF-51D G-TFSI. Rob Davies was of course at one time, for a number of years, the owner/operator of the P-51D G-HAEC painted as "Big Beautiful Doll", and based at this airfield. I had to familiarize myself a bit with the local roads to keep myself aware of the whereabouts of the airfield even only flying locally as I was (can't use the GPS to find it) and hard to spot visually at any distance among all of the other fields.












  18. #18

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