2020 LTS airport announcement and Iceland intro draft: Difference between revisions

What should be the title? "Flightgear 2020.3 LTS: Welcome to Keflavik and Iceland"? It may need 2020.3 LTS to show up in search results.

FG's 2020.3 Long Term Stable (LTS) release will move to the world's newest country, geologically speaking, Iceland.  

Keflavík International Airport (BIKF) is the featured airport for the LTS. Keflavík airport is the largest airport in Iceland with 10 million people passing through in 2018. It serves as the international gateway to Iceland, and its 3 km runways are a Space Shuttle emergency landing site.

Keflavik Airport is modeled in detail, including and Rainbow (“Regnbogi”) art installations at the airport.  

For Iceland there are also buildings, roads, and objects like pylons for the whole country generated from Open Street Maps (OSM) data by the OSM2City project. These are available as a [http://wiki.flightgear.org/Areas_populated_with_osm2city_scenery separate download] [which will be added to TerraSync a later date?]. OSM2City buildings compatible with 2020 LTS have improved visuals and render faster.  

Iceland's volcanoes are often strato-volcanoes, in contrast to the shield volcanoes of Hawaii - the C172p tutorial airport (PHTO) is located in a town at the foot of to 2 huge shield volcanoes. Strato-volcanoes have steeper sloping sides, as the lava that comes up often is more viscous for periods of time - it flows less easily, like honey compared to water. This lava becomes hard before spreading far. The lava, before it reaches the surface, is called magma. Strato-volcanoes have periods where the magma coming up is viscous, and eruptions can be explosive - as gasses dissolved in the magma remain trapped. These eruptions can cause craters. Shield volcanoes only tend to have magma that flows easily, so they have very shallow slopes (as low as 5 degrees) as the lava spreads far. Iceland does have shield volcanoes, but they are smaller.  

Caldera in the central highlands with a large lake, in the colder part of the year. There is a thin layer of snow, and the water has some ice cover - environment simulation options like these are set from Environment menu > Environment Settings:

Flightgear models several Icelandic volcanoes at multiple activity levels; Eyjafjallajökull, Surtsey, and Katla. Eyjafjallajökull and it's cloud of volcanic ash caused severe disruption to aviation in 2010. Katla is a far bigger volcano located nearby. Past eruptions at Katla have ranged from a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 4 like Eyjafjallajökull, to a VEI of 6 like Mount Pinturbo (1991) or Krakatoa (1883). Scarily Katla is somewhat overdue for an eruption. Screenshots don't do justice to the boiling turbulence of a volcanic plume like Katla. We won't spoil it, so you can discover and appreciate the scale of the forces involved. FG's Advanced Weather engine now models the increased turbulence in wind-fields associated with volcanic activity, so beware!. To set the activity level of a volcano fly to the area, and look in Environment > Volcanoes to choose from the volcanoes in that area.

To re-create the stark subpolar setting, remember to turn on overlays which add high resolution 3d detail, and set [http://wiki.flightgear.org/Anti-aliasing#Transparency_anti-aliasing Transparency Anti-Aliasing] to MSAA in the GPU control panel (or supersampling on powerful cards). As Iceland has few trees, people with older GPUs may find they have spare performance and can use overlays in Iceland.  

A place needs 4 dimensions to describe it, 3 in space and 1 in time. Any default setting can only be a moment in time, and in FG the ever-changing cycles of nature is simulated from the Environment > Environment Settings menu. In FG's environment sliders, Iceland is often suited being towards the autumn season with wet ground and moss. The more northern seas away from the south coast can ice up, so remember the ice cover control.

[Screenshots of varying environment sliders. Probably needs to be cropped: [http://wiki.flightgear.org/File:Iceland_airport_keep_-_summer,_Keflavik_International_Airport_(BIKF)_in_Flightgear_2020_LTS_01.jpg summer] , [http://wiki.flightgear.org/File:Iceland_airport_keep_-_autumn,_Keflavik_International_Airport_(BIKF)_in_Flightgear_2020_LTS_02.jpg autumn] [http://wiki.flightgear.org/File:Iceland_airport_keep-later_in_autumn,_Keflavik_International_Airport_(BIKF)_in_Flightgear_2020_LTS_05.jpg later in autumn] , [http://wiki.flightgear.org/File:Iceland_airport_keep-_thin_snow,_Keflavik_International_Airport_(BIKF)_in_Flightgear_2020_LTS_06.jpg snow], [http://wiki.flightgear.org/File:Iceland_airport_keep_-_water_puddles,_Keflavik_International_Airport_(BIKF)_in_Flightgear_2020_LTS_04.jpg puddles lower right quadrant]]

Flightgear's Advanced Weather (AW) engine simulates terrain-driven, continually evolving, weather - look under Environment > Detailed Weather > Advanced Weather settings for controls. To activate the weather simulation, choose weather scenarios in the list from "Core high pressure region", through to "Warm Sector" - these describe the air masses around your starting point. "Fair Weather" is fine, as it's just "Core high pressure region". Other types of scenarios will do things like tie weather to best guesses at vague METARs, and apply the same weather everywhere all the time. Using live METARs will additionally tie FG to weather conditions for the current time of day and season for that location - regardless of the time, date, and season you simulate.

To recreate the turbulent windfields associated with the rugged mountainous terrain make sure terrain effects and presampling is enabled. The controls for detailed gust controls, cloud shadows, ground haze and structure are also there.   For shorter trips you may want to decrease the sizes of distinct air masses and scales of weather patterns, to see more change, more often. There are far more weather variables under the hood than are (and can be) exposed in the GUI. These weather variables are randomised each time the AW simulation is restarted - press 'Apply' to restart. Remember that to recreate Iceland's cool temperatures, the temperature offset needs be lowered to adjust the weather scenarios used AW simulation - put in a negative value to lower temperatures like "-25". As temperatures decrease, rain will turn to snow or hail as appropriate, and with lower temperatures you'll be rewarded more often with stunning halos and scattering by ice crystals in clouds.  

Alouette-III over the meltwater lake (terminal lake) at the end of a glacier (glacier terminus or snout).

Closing line if a further is needed e.g. Stay tuned for the 2020 LTS release in the next few days