April 1, 2018
Introduction
Welcome to Threshold’s weekly news recap for today the 1st of April, 2018 (no, this is not an April Fools’ joke!). We aim for this weekly piece to be a collection of all the news that has occurred in the last week that we didn’t get to! The Threshold Weekly Recap will be released every Sunday.
In case you missed it;
In the biggest news this week, Orbx show off TrueEarth Netherlands, as well as UK TrueEarth with EGCB Barton. Rotate release the first full exterior images of their MD-11, and UK2000 debut London Luton for X-Plane, which you can read more about later in this recap!
VSkyLabs; A lot of news.
VSkyLabs are never not working it seems. The team have showed off 3 different projects this week. First off, is BASE-1. BASE-1 is a totally fictional air base located deep in the Alaskan wilderness. Built for testing the VSL DC-3/C-47 the base has one 1200 metre runway and cannot be accessed by land vehicles. VSkyLabs said this about BASE-1;
VSKYLABS BASE-1 scenery is having progress. This is a fictional but plausible airbase which is located in the mountains somewhere in Alaska. The infrastructure of the base is being set first.The base is not accessible by any kind of a land vehicle, and the main runway is about 3900 feet long (1200 meters).On site, which covers the main base area and a few other interest areas, there are several communication and research facilities. Also to be found is a solar power plant which is going to be glowing up intensively (hopefully this trick will work as planned) when sun is visible *and* when there is no clouds coverage above.The base personnel who are staying on-site, living in a protected habitat compound.
In between… I’m scooping around using VR also, and there are several *amazing* locations on site, such as near the space communication 70m antennas, and around the personnel habitat area, and…on top of one of the wind turbines maintenance baskets.This is going to be an unusual place to fly to and from, with unusual possibilities for ground exploration.
The second project previewed by VSkyLabs this week is the XF-85. The XF-85 “Goblin” was conceived during World War II as a “parasite” aircraft used to protect a larger bomber aircraft and escort said plane to a bombing zone – however, the plan fell through, and today only two prototype aircraft were ever built.
The VSkyLabs XF-85 had some bumps along the development timeline too, with the project being put on hold due to a critical bug with the way X-Plane deals with aircraft being dropped from another aircraft, like the X-15. Recently fixed however, VSkyLabs have restarted development. Here is what VSkyLabs had to say about the McDonnell XF-85 Goblin;The XF-85 project development was paused for a few months, right until Laminar Research fixed a bug which caused frame rate to drop dramatically when setting up an aircraft release from a carrier aircraft. This bug was fixed couple of weeks ago, and the XF-85 development is now back on the tracks. The project will include a B-36 carrier aircraft (non-flyable-by-human) to complete the scene.Here are a few screenshots showing the ‘VSKYLABS Test-Pilot: XF-85’ prototype with some closeup shots. It was shot today during flight dynamics model works. Most of the development is now focusing on the interiors and on the flight dynamics aspects, and the progress is pretty good.The attachment hook is animated, but the aircraft will be landing on the ground after the air-release and powered flight, on a belly skid (not shown in these screenshots)
Third and finally in VSkyLabs news, is the Solar Impulse 2. The Impulse 2 is VSL’s main project at the moment, with the aircraft planned to be fully study level – complete with FMOD sounds and PBR textures! You can see what they have to say about the Solar Impulse 2 below;
Visible in the following screenshots is the air-brakes, being used for landing and descent. These are operated with the use of a manual hand crank on the left side of the cockpit (I’m waiting impatiently to crank it down/up with the VR controller…).Another interesting detail is the caster-main-wheel, which is being simulated also, and the only way to maintain runway heading while landing in crosswinds.The aircraft is sure not an “easy flyer”, and every moment of manual flying is a challenge, with quite a high pilot workload. It is not a glider, so be prepared to hold on a heavy mass which stays aloft with a very small airspeed margin and power authority. The narrow operational airspeed range along with its engines and flying characteristics gets the flying style and management into a *precision flying* mode from the moment you set the throttles up. Maintaining accurate heading direction and the figures for climbing are not for the novice pilot.
Riverside (KRAL) by RD Studios
For those of you not following this developer, they put in a lot of detail. The first two images are the only new images this week, but we’ve included a few extra for those who might not be familiar with the project. You can follow more of their fantastic work here, or view previous screenshots here.
Svalbard4XP gets the TerraMAXX treatment
Svalbard4XP by Maps4XPlane has received a small update. Released on the 30th, this update brings compatibility with MAXX-XP’s TerraMAXX. Textures from TerraMAXX are freely interchangeable with the included winter textures. You can see the full update on the M2XP Facebook page here.
UK2000 Gatwick & Luton news
In a post to the official UK2K Facebook page, Gary has confirmed the release date of Luton Xtreme for X-Plane 10 & 11.
If you didn’t read Scott’s article with Matt Cox this week, check it out!
The post reads;
Luton Xtreme for X-Plane will be released on Saturday 7th April for our X-Plane fans 🙂
Secondly in UK2000 news, Gatwick Xtreme receives a small update. Also posted on the UK2K Facebook page, the update (v4.21) fixes some small bugs. You can see the change log below;
-Fixed missing jetways
-Fixed tower view
-Fixed stands with wrong names
To install, simply delete the old scenery and download and install the new one 🙂
FF A320U sound update
There was a pretty substantive sounds update to the FlightFactor A320 published earlier this week. You can download it with your updater. Here’s a link to the discussion topic on the forum.
How did we do?
That’s it for this week! This being our first ‘Weekly News Recap’, so we’d like to get some feedback on whether or not we should continue this style of reporting. Of course, we will still report news on the day it occurs, but things that we didn’t catch will go in here. If you’d like to give us some feedback about the News Recap, you could comment on our Facebook page, or PM us on the same page. You could also use the contact form tool at the bottom of the ThresholdX.net home page.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Written by Sam Clark and Scott Havener