This file provides a transatlantic cruise ship route from Southampton, England to New York City. The route features an enroute stopover at the Titanic Memorial Platform. This is the plan that was used in the "Queen Mary 2 Anniversary Flight" event sponsored by the Multiplayer Adventures Forum at SurClaro in June, 2005.
Simply place this file in your C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\Modules\FSNavigator\Plan folder and call up the plan from FSNav. The cruise ship has no autopilot function so you must manually steer the ship according to the plan's waypoints.
Use this FSNav file with Mitsuya Hama Hamaguchi's excellent Queen Mary 2 cruise ship for FS9. The Queen Mary 2 is freeware and can be downloaded from http://fs-shipyards.com; the file name is ship-QM2.zip. (Be sure to get the correct file; there is an AI version of the QM2 there as well.) Hama also has several other cruise ships that can be downloaded at this site. The Titanic Memorial Platform scenery can be downloaded from FS-Shipyards too and is also available in the library at SurClaro. The name of the scenery is "titanic9.zip".
Some discoveries about the QM2 model and a couple of FS9 adjustments will make your use of this and other ships more fun.
1. There is a weight and balance problem with the original QM2 Aircraft.cfg file. At very low fuel levels, the bow rises out of the water, making the passengers very angry. The following change will improve the low fuel balance greatly. Use a text editor to open the Aircraft.cfg file. Under "WEIGHT_AND_ BALANCE", simply change the value for "empty_weight" to 70000 and resave the file. Many thanks to Hama for this fix.
2. Piloting is done manually, because the autopilot and FSNav autopilot are not available when on the surface, be it land or water. FSNav navigation course planning can be done quite nicely, however, allowing you to take the ships over long distances over water using only a very few course heading changes.
3. Slow speed maneuvers are best done in SLEW mode. Use your slew controls to maneuver the ship in harbors and when docking.
4. The minimum lateral slew rate forward and back and left and right in FS9 is 6 knots for a single keypress which is really too fast to correctly simulate the slow rates used by the ships. The slew rotation speed is also way too fast. These can be easily adjusted in your FS9 cfg file. Go to your C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Microsoft\FS9 folder and back up the FS9 cfg file. Then open the cfg file with Notepad. About one third of the way down the page are the following entries under the SLEW heading:
Change the MaxLateralRate value to 16000.000000
Change the MaxHeadingRate value to 40.000000
Save the modified file as the new FS9 cfg file. The new MaxLateralRate value will lower the lateral slew speed from 6 knots to 2 knots for one keypress; the change in the MaxHeadingRate will result in a very slow controlled rotation of the ship on its axis for a single keypress. Remember these changes affect slewing in all aircraft, so you may want to alter my selections some to get the effects you want.
5. The ship carries sufficient fuel to run about six hours at full throttle. It begins to pitch up and down some when you get below 25% fuel, so you'll need to refuel occasionally while on long trips. You can do this by using the FS9 menu 'Aircraft/Fuel and Balance" and manually entering additional fuel values. A better way is to go to the FS9 menu "Options/Controls/Assignments" and assign a keypress to the "Add Fuel Quantity" event. I assigned Shift-F to this event. After making this assignment, pressing Shift F several times in succession will immediately refuel all tanks to maximum and you won't even have to slow down.
The QM2 occasionally cruises on the FSHost server of the MUltiplayer Adventures Forum. To get the multiplayer IP, Visit the Forum. Be sure to come fly with us on one of our monthly sanctioned events. You can reach the Forum through this direct link: http://forums.SurClaro/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=11 Bookmark it so you can come back and visit often.
This FSNav file is freeware with no use restrictions. Public domain.
