FS2004 with a great range of aircraft

zswobbie1

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I was just thinking about our 20 year history of FS2004, and the great kind of sim we can have, with only the aircraft from Mike Stone, Garry Smith, Bill & Lyn Lyons,
Jens B Kristenssen, Kazunori Ito, Greg Pepper, Tom Gibson, Brian Gladden, Cliff Presley, Alexander Belov, to name a few Giants of our hobby. Sadly, there are those who are no longer with us, but have given us 20 years of simming happiness.
There are, of course, many more!
 
You can add Piglet and Milton Shupe to that list along with Dave Maltby, Rick Piper, Dave Garwood, Dave Molyneaux, etc. My FS2004 hanger is full of freeware aircraft by all of these people, in fact I would say 95% of the aircraft in there are freeware.
 
and not to forget all those who did sceneries to enhance our well loved sim.
A lot of people did invest themselves to give us add-ons to full fill the fs9
world with more life
Best regards
Yours
Michael
 
Dave Wooster and Mick Morrisey have contributed some great models and paint schemes as well. I keep going back to the Gee Bees, Cessna Airmaster and Temco Pinto regularly.

I stick with FS9 because of its stability and flexibility. And if a new toy in CFS2 arrives I can drop it into FS9 and go fly it right now.

So many models, so little time!

normb
 
And there are some nice CFS2 planes out there as well.
I've ended up with 252GB of FS2004. So it is a bit slow to load, but it is so hard to clear out some planes.
Just never know what & where I want to fly. I suppose that is what 20 years of add-ons does! :wiggle::icon30:
 
I've ended up with 252GB of FS2004. So it is a bit slow to load, but it is so hard to clear out some planes.
Just never know what & where I want to fly. I suppose that is what 20 years of add-ons does! :wiggle::icon30:

I'm the same way - 266 gigs of models in my hangar. And I hardly ever have a chance to fly any of them! But I have found a solution to FS's slow loading when it's full of aircraft: keep the aircraft somewhere else, out of the FS9 Aircraft folder.

I found out a couple computers ago that the more I had in the Aircraft folder the slower the sim was to load. So I made a Hangar folder - now a Hangar drive - where I keep all the planes in folders broken down with folders dedicated to Early Birds, WWI, Golden Age, WW2, and Post-WW2. Within those are sub-folders named by category, like Prop Singles, Small Twin Props, Big Props, Small Jets, Big Jets, Rotary Wings, Gliders and so on. All I have in my FS9 Aircraft folder are the few stock planes that are appropriate for each sim (Golden Wings for up to 1945, FS1954 - A Half Century of Flight for the classic era (1945 to around 1960), Jet Age (c.1960 to maybe the seventies) and an almost stock FS2004 that I've done almost nothing with except to fix up my local area as it was around the beginning of the millennium. For all but FS2004 that means the Piper Cub and the DC-3, plus the Wright Flye and the Ford Trimotor in GW and the Schweitzer glider in FS1954, Jet Age and FS2004 (which keeps all of them.)

Otherwise the Aircraft folder is full of AI planes, and I try to keep that to a minimum when I populate an airport by mostly decorating the ramps with static aircraft models and just having a few AI planes, ones that might show up anywhere so they can be used in multiple locations, just enough to show some movement at the airport.
 
Dave Wooster and Mick Morrisey have contributed some great models and paint schemes as well. I keep going back to the Gee Bees, Cessna Airmaster and Temco Pinto regularly.

I stick with FS9 because of its stability and flexibility. And if a new toy in CFS2 arrives I can drop it into FS9 and go fly it right now.

So many models, so little time!

normb
Thanks for the shout-out Norm!

I stick with FS9 for those same reasons. Those and avoidance of the need to have to update a bunch of software before you can work in a new sim, and most of all because so many great models become non-functional in newer sims than they were built for. They may lose parts or animations like so many great FS8 planes did when FS9 came out, or just not fly right. And then there's the need to spend time learning new techniques - when I never have time to play with the planes I work on already, and a to-do list that will keep me busy if I live to be two hundred.
 
My pet peeve was FSX, with its 'A' & 'S' keys to change different views, & what a hassle it was (for me) to keep pushing keys to get me back to my original view. I just kept on staying with Fs2004.
 
I remember a young Italian painter named Damian Radice, who posted as Windrunner. He was one of the best texture painters ever. We lost him at a young age to leukemia some years ago.

Also missed is Paul "Putt-Putt" Clawson. He was always encouraging when I messed around with his models, and he gave my early painting efforts a big boost when he upgraded to the next version and gave me his old Paint Shop Pro 7, complete with the printed manual the size of a small city's telephone directory, which I still use.
 
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I've always supported the freeware guys, who became almost friends to us. It is so heartening that there are still so many of us 'flying with the greats'. I became friends & beta testers for a few, just by dropping a mail of thanks & chatting. So, in a strange way, FS2004 has become very personal for many of us.
 
Hi Mick, my issue is space. I have just less than 60GB free space on my 2TB portable drive, that I'm running the sim from, so. unless I do major surgery & delete planes, (which would be like saying Goodbye to some good friends, I'll have to stick with slowish loading times. I'm also runnng the sim off that portable drive as well, & that slightly slows loading time as well.
But that is just what simming is all about.
 
Hi Mick, my issue is space. I have just less than 60GB free space on my 2TB portable drive, that I'm running the sim from, so. unless I do major surgery & delete planes, (which would be like saying Goodbye to some good friends, I'll have to stick with slowish loading times. I'm also runnng the sim off that portable drive as well, & that slightly slows loading time as well.
But that is just what simming is all about.
All you need is another big external drive to put your hangar on. I have a 7TB external that I use for backup (my main hangar is in an internal drive but one all its own, as is my FlightSim drive. ) The only thing I don't like about that huge external drive is that it takes longer than I'd like to wake up when accessed and goes to sleep a bit sooner than I'd like when I stop doing things in it. My hangar has about as many planes as you've got and it only fills a small fraction of that big 7TB external.
 
Storage space is always an issue. One day I'll Feng shui my drive. I did have 6 smaller drives (1TB) collected over the years, with categorized folders, but they all went missing when my laptop, with all the drives in a backpack, went missing.
 
A few years ago, I had all of my Planes on an 150 gig WD External plug in Drive, which went belly up. I ended up re-downloading all of them (well, most of them) and put them on Flash Drives. Every few months the local MicroCenter computer store sends me a Coupon for a free 128 gig Flash Drive so that saves me $10. I save both the Original zip files and the Files I stick into the Sim, then cut and paste them back and forth. :)
 
I remember a young Italian painter named Damian Radice, who posted as Windrunner. He was one of the best texture painters ever. We lost him at a young age to leukemia some years ago.

Also missed is Paul "Putt-Putt" Clawson. He was always encouraging when I messed around with his models, and he gave my early painting efforts a big boost when he upgraded to the next version and gave me his old Paint Shop Pro 7, complete with the printed manual the size of a small city's telephone directory, which I still use.

Wasn't there another Repainter from way back when named John Terrell who did some nice Military Repaints?

A couple more to add to the illustrious List of Creators:

Steven Grant
Fred Choate
J.E. Narcizo (RanchoJEN)
Glenn Copeland
Keith Mitchell
 
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John Terrell is also known as Bomber_12th, and is still around, but he has moved to the newest sims.

Cheers,
Huub
 
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One more: Joe Binka. He gave us that fabulous Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome scenery and several great airplanes. His Cessna 195 comes to mind. Sadly he let himself get run out of the hobby when someone posted a beta version of a plane they were testing for him and he got so upset that he left the hobby. Or maybe more likely, just stopped sharing his creations.
 
Chris Lampard (forgive my spelling) and Kazanori Ito did some extraordinary models for FS9. I have nearly 300GB of aircraft, with another 250GB of tweaks, mods, panels and sounds. I haven't flown FS9 in nearly 6 years but I still have an extensive catalog of goodies for that sim.
 
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