Eastern Bloc retro downloads

[johnfromoz]

Thanks to the talents who recently gave us some great German airports and the superb Berlin and East German fields pack, I was inspired to move east and set up some Cold War military AI, with some success for East Germany. For anyone with the same bug, this may help.

I soon ran out of resources at the regular spots, but took a look at www.avsimrus.com/. Apart from a few period aircraft (the Beriev Be12 amphibian, for example) there were a number of air bases which seemed like they would do. Some came with their own AI Tu95 / 142 aircraft.

avsim.rus has an option for English language. However, one of their links goes to rusaviagold.narod.ru/ - a Russian retro site, unfortunately only in Russian! The scenery downloads are all I have looked through so far. They seem to be mixed periods back to the thirties, and some sceneries are non-airport. It's a little hard to be sure which are FS2004 and which 2002, but it probably won't matter for non-airport, and we can make our own AFCADs at a pinch!

I also suspect that a few of the pre-WW2 places depicted off-airport would not have changed much in twenty or thirty years, but a little tweaking with Instant Scenery using the Cal Classic libraries could help that.

[Willy]

I took a Beriev amphib I found, adopted Bill Lyons' S43 AI flight model to it and it works fine for me. I've got it going in and out of various Soviet airfields.

[Tom/CalClassic]

Yeah, there's a lot more that could be done.

[johnfromoz]

Oct 31, 2008 18:31:44 GMT -5 Tom/CalClassic said:

Yeah, there's a lot more that could be done.

Yep - never-ending!

Willy - thanks, must try that on the Beriev, I've tried everything else! The S43 was an amphib too, I think? I'll know shortly...

Some of the sceneries were absolutely 1930 period with static biplanes and old uniforms on the people in a couple, Torsten Wille's 3D Remover took care of reducing them to the basic airfield structures.

Some of the FS9 scenery AFCADs were fully structured, except there were no connectors to the many parking spots! Also the parking codes might need changing to those for period aircraft. And of course I think rotating some parks 90 degrees and moving them further onto aprons from terminals is appropriate.

EDIT: There are also some Soviet-era Hungarian airports available at AVSIM, by Tamás Varhegyi with, in most cases, Péter Borovszky. Many are still in civilian use but most retain some sort of military style. They are very nice, if they are sparse on buildings, but EZ scenery is available for a reason! Again, a little AFCAD tweaking is good.