It's that time of year again...

Well, actually, it's over at last, and the days are already getting longer. Won't be long now and we'll be looking at Easter Bunnies on the supermarket shelves.

I hope you all had a pleasant Christmas. Did you remember the Christmas Spirit? Or was it just the Christmas spirit?

Hasn't tempus fugitted this year? It seems like ages since I last had anything to blog about. Not to worry, the Dornier has taken up a lot of my free painting time and of the rest of my available hours, my day job has been responsible for hacking those away.

In the meantime, FSX has come and (in a few cases) gone from our PCs. Some folk are dismayed at its (lack of) performance, others are pragmatic enough to realise that it's been designed to have breathing space for the next few generations of PC growth. I have been playing with this tenth generation of FS and fortunately have a computer that can handle the load reasonably well, although I still have to adjust my settings before each flight.

I've also been invited to do some beta testing, so now I have a mission as well as a cause. And I have also been asked to do a commercial paintkit for someone in the new year, so my card is relatively full for a while.

What really has pleased me has been a plethora of new goodies for FSX - just in time for a Christmas CC bashing session. There's been the Tiger Moth (a little disappointing but not a total waste of money), Some new sceneries and - much better - some excellent freeware released. Although I've only had her on my PC for a few hours so far, Rick Piper's Chipmunk for FSX has already won her place in my heart for FSX. Even as installed (she's still a work-in-progress) the Chippie is a delight. The only mistake I made with my first flight was to set up weather in FSX and not spot an errant zero in the windspeeds settings...

...I had 10 (ten) knot winds gusting 150!!!!!! And bear in mind that I also use FSUIPC and have effects such as turbulence activated. Man, can you imagine the bumpy ride I was getting?

Anyway, here's a couple of images to show what I am up to these days. There's more on my photobucket link. Have a happy New Year's Eve and remember - it's not much longer till Burns' Night!


"Beavering towards Sitka" in somewhat minimal conditions - FSX


"Chippie over London" using the real weather as provided by ActiveSky for FSX


Flying Chuck Lischer's F260 over Oshkosh in FSX


Chippying over High Wycombe... ATC has just told me that Booker is IFR, but I'm still going in!


"Vingt et Un" pair doing a very close pass at Wanaka.

Been Away for some time....

Ah well, we all need a day job so that we can pay for our hobbies. It has been a wee bit busy at work of late, so I haven't had much time in the way of feeding the blog.

Another thing keeping me busy these days is the Dornier DO27. 'Tis a wonderful plane, with an excellent paintkit, but the more you delve, the more you find inconsistencies with the scaling and aligning of the various parts of the model. If you pay a visit to my Photobucket album, you can browse to the various albums to see what I am up to.

Thing is, when you get down to the detail, you find you need things like a detail grid so that you can locate and line up details on the textures. I do this with a simple scaled and multi-coloured grid - here you can see a couple of examples. Try it yourselves sometimes...

Recorder Module and Smoke

Bazzam posted a comment recently - er well, some while ago - and asked about smoke in the recorder module.

You can show smoke and record smoke in the recorder - there's an option in the setup of "recorder" to record smoke.