The MS scenery for the Suez channel region in Egypt has much improved in FS2004, but nevertheless
there are several flaws which I have tried to correct in this scenery:
- the harbours on both ends of the channel (Port Said and Port Tawfiq/Suez), which were only roughly indicated, are represented with more detail, some shorelines at Port Said have been corrected (the available satellite photographs show that MS has used outdated maps)
- the bridges blocking the passage through the eastern channel at Port Said and in the southern part of the main channel have been removed as well as a ship which MS put at 90° to the waterway!
- there are (to my knowledge) only two bridges across the channel (at Qantara and Feridan), both were missing and have been added (the turning bridge at Feridan in the open state)
- since there was almost no traffic in the channel, a number of ships of various types have been added. I tried to make the ships similar to real world ships you might see in the Suez channel without going into too much detail. The Panama channel, which in MS seems to correspond much more to reality than the Suez channel, is almost without traffic too, so I plan to add some of my ships there too.
- the landclass values, which here as almost everywhere in Egypt mostly are unrealistic, have been adjusted near the channel.
In addition, I used satellite photographs to add taxiways etc. to the military airports in the region. (In contrast to reality I added PAPI lights to some of the runways, because I found it beyond my capabilities to land a military jet on a runway without such lights, if you do not like them it is easy to remove them with AFCAD). Where I added a tower to an airport, I used a general type, because I have no photographs of the airports (and it would be rather difficult to obtain them).
Installation of the scenery is as usual, you can take the folder structure in the ZIP file as guidance. Do not forget to put the two landclass files in an extra folder that has no "texture" subfolder.
Use the scenery "as it is". I tested it by flying over it several times, but I cannot guarantee that it might not spoil your installation or your framerates.
This scenery is freeware, so do not try to make money with it. If you are a scenery designer and you like the ships, feel free to use them for other freeware sceneries, but I would appreciate if you would inform me about that. All ship models are in a library file (GmaxShips1.bgl), and for your convenience I included the XML file with which I built that library, so you can find the GUID's for the different models.
I hope you will enjoy to fly over that part of the wonderful country that Egypt is!
