FSX RAF Mount Pleasant Scenery

RAF Mount Pleasant (EGYP) in the Falkland Islands. It includes aircraft hangars, aircraft shelters, workshops, accomodation buildings, and the magazine areas. It includes night textures. It also requires the download and installation of some free third party libraries for best effect. By Mike Hudson.

1. Introduction
This is a depiction of RAF Mount Pleasant (EGYP) in the Falkland Islands. It includes aircraft hangars, aircraft shelters, workshops, accomodation buildings, and the magazine areas. It includes night textures. It also requires the download and installation of some free third party libraries for best effect.

RAF Mount Pleasant was opened in 1985 on East Falkland, to provide greater space and accomodation than was available at Port Stanley. It was originally equipped with Phantom FGR2's. These were replaced by Tornado F3's, and now by Typhoon's. C130 Hercules provide transport, there is a VC10 tanker, and Sea King helicopters. There are civil flights to the UK, and a weekly civil flight to Chile.

2. About this scenery
Information, especially photographs of Mount Pleasant are, not surprisingly, sparse. I am therefore aware that the accuracy of this scenery may not be that great. I have tried to provide the feel of the base, not super detail. The constuction was accomplished using whatever limited source I could find on the net. The layout is taken from Google Earth, which represents sometime in 2006. Building information comes only from those photographs which are available, and I have had to interpolate and use my imagination in many areas. The Google Earth images were taken when the sun was high, this gives good definition of shape but makes estimation of building height from length of shadow difficult. In particular the buildings in the magazine area are my design, although I believe they are typical of a number of explosive storage buildings, but not necessarily at Mount Pleasant.
The vast majority of buildings, and the static Phantom aircraft were constructed by myself. They are of simple design as there are many of them.

This scenery is designed to be used in conjunction with "Falklands 2007" by Brian Jamieson. I strongly recommend the use of this scenery. It is available as "falklnds.zip".
It is possible to use this with the default FSX scenery, but this is not a good representation of the Falklands.

The Falklands are far from flat, and Mount Pleasant is in many areas built into the topography. Due to the limitations of FSX the runways and taxiways have to be flat. I have therefore elected to construct the whole airfield on a flat surface, and have used the sloping polygon facility of ADE9X to aviod cliff edges and to blend into the surrounding scenery. It is obvious from both photographs and Google Earth that the aircraft shelters and magazine buildings have protective embankments around them. A lot of these are provided by natural features. On a flat airfield I have had to create all of these as man made features. I think it looks better and more realistic with them than without.

It is usual to provide a grass background area to an airfield, however this seemed inappropriate to Mount Pleasant. Therefore the airport background is Savannah grass, which is the same as the landclass used in this area by Brian Jamieson's scenery. A consequence of this is that bushes appear on the aprons and taxiways even though the flatten also excludes autogen. I have managed to eliminate this by setting the autogen level to zero. This has no detrimental affect as there are no buildings or other objects in the area anyway. I suggest you do the same. I believe I could have avoided this by constructing the landclass polygons around and touching, but not under, the aprons and taxiways. If you look at the airport layout you will see that this is a massive job. I decided to use the simple solution.

I have used some generic FSX objects. The control tower, water tower, and the silos in the magazine area are from the excellent RAF objects by Ted Andrews.

Vehicles in the Falklands appear to be mostly 4x4s. Almost all the photographs I could find show Land Rovers. Most of the vehicles are therefore Land Rovers by Stephen Legg, Paul Mitchell or the UKVFR library. I have however used some Transit vans from the same authors.

Ground support equipment is by Paul Mitchell, including a Rapier missile radar and launcher.
I have added an aircraft load of 4 Skyflash and 4 Sidewinder (without any markings), to an S trolley. Unfortunately I could not remove the bomb cradles, but you have to look close to see them.

You will have to download and install the third party scenery to see all but the generic and custom objects.

I have provided 3 military combat parking areas, and 4 military cargo parking areas. If you own ADE9X you can easily change this if you desire.

The communication and nav frequencies are:-
NDB (MP) 380Khz
VOR/DME (MTP) 114.7Mhz
Approach (MOUNT PLEASANT) 118.5Mhz
Ground (MOUNT PLEASANT) 130.3Mhz
Tower (MOUNT PLEASANT) 133.35Mhz
ATIS (EGYP) 128.55Mhz
ILS runway 05 (MAP1) 108.95Mhz
ILS runway 10 (MAP2) 110.3Mhz
ILS runway 23 (MAP3) 109.5Mhz
ILS runway 28 (MAP4) 109.9Mhz

For installation instructions please see separate document.

3. Construction
The scenery was constructed using:-
Airport Design Editor, ADE9X, by Jon Masterson.
FS Design Studio 3.5.1, by Abacus
Paint Shop Pro X, by Corel
DXTbmp, by Martin Wright
Google Earth
FS Earth, from wideview
Textures from "www.cgtextures.com" modified by myself

4. Third Party Libraries
To get the best effect the following free third party sceneries should be downloaded and installed:-

UKVFR library, available as "UKVFRlibrary.zip".

"objects01_lib.zip" by Stephen Legg.

"raf_control_towers_library.zip"; "rafbuildingsvol2.zip"; "tedsraftextures.zip" by Ted Andrews. (If you make your own scenery or use programmes like Instant Scenery I suggest you install all of his RAF object sceneries).

"raf_gse.zip" by Paul Mitchell.

5. Frame Rates
I am getting frame rates of between 14 and 19.9 (I set to 20 max) using this scenery, Brian Jamiesons Falklands 2007 and the default Cessna. What you achieve will be dependant on any other scenery you have enabled, the aircraft you are flying, and your computer specification.

6. Legal
This is provided as freeware. The copyright in the scenery design, and the custom objects, is mine, as is the position/orientation/scale of the third party objects within the scenery. The copyright in the third party libraries themselves is that of the original authors.
One or more textures on this 3D model have been created with images from CGTextures.com. These images may not be redistributed by default.

This scenery is not to be used for commercial gain, nor to be uploaded to any site that extracts payment.

If by any chance you wish to use the custom models in scenery that you create and upload yourself, please do so but do not bundle the file "RAF_Buildings_msh" or the textures with your scenery. Instead provide instructions on how to download, install, and activate them from this zip file. They must not be used for any commercial gain, and due credit should be given.

These files should not harm you or your computer, but you use them entirely at your own risk!

Finally
This is my first scenery. It has taken many hours to complete, and at times has caused much frustration. I started this for my own benefit, and overall have enjoyed creating it. As with all things I realise there could be improvement, but I am content with it as it is. I have decided to upload so that those who may find it of interest have the chance to use it. I hope you enjoy flying from RAF Mount Pleasant and around the Falklands. If by any chance you do not like this scenery - JUST DELETE IT!

Mike Hudson