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Powerlines and Solar Farm

By Mamudesign

OVERVIEW

When you fly VFR, in real life, being near the ground leads to lot of dangers.

One of the most common one is the possibility you get caught in a power line (electricity transmission line)

MSFS has powerlines pylons, but no wire between them

With my addon I added the wires between each pylon for high voltage power lines (more than 60k volts).

Actual coverage includes: Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, Suisse, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, Nederland, Luxembourd and Poland.

The project coverage is gonna increse overtime

With this addon, along with my other add-on Project Lifts and the spectacular We love VFR by Puffinflight, the long time ago request:“Please add powerlines, gondalas, mast” from the MSFS Wishlist has been fulfilled, for free, by independent developers. Hey Asobo, that is 2 person work :D

FEATURING:

The project use Open Street Map data (the same source of Microsoft) for pylon placing

Because each “line” (way) of the trasmission grid has a specific “voltage” in the OSM data, i have assigned specific pylon and number of cables by using that value

So, lines up to 140k volts get 3-wire, line between 140k and 280k get 4-wires and lines above 280k volts will get a 6-wire setup (OSM data also has nr. of wires data, but is quiete unconsistent, so this is the deal)

To spice things up, and provide additional realism, I have crossed Powerlines data with Airports, major roads, rivers, and digital elevation model (SRTM1).

In this way i can detect where to place white and red marker balls for the cables and red/white painted pylons

Rules as folow:

- Within Airport boundaries no pylons or wires are allowed

- From each runways threshold, in an area 1500 meters long and 300 meters wide, powerline will have marker balls and red white pylons

- When a wire cross a major river or major road marker balls are placed

- Also, when a wire crosses a a major valley marker balls are placed  (more that 50 meters from the bottom of the valley to the base of the pylon, this make the ground-wire clearence to about 70/90 meters)

All the above rules may not follow individual countries regulations, but you know, is not a “Cable simulator”!

I did not notice any major FPS impact

SOLAR FARMS

Another thing that the sim was missing was Solar Panels / Solar Farms

So i did them! Basic implementation, but no more empy black-bluish fields

The data source is of course the Open Street Map database. When a single panel is mapped i’m placing it accordingly, while if an entire solar farm is mapped as an entire “area”, i’m filling it with regular patterns

I’m still working on the placing routines / solar panels aspect, so a limited number of countries is provided

Over extremely large solar farms, if too close, fps is gonna lower a bit

KNOW ISSUES:

If you already know my Project Lifts scenery, the issues are the same:

To be able to place wires between pylons I NEED to know the exact altitude above sea level of each pylon at design time. Since there is no way to obtain the data from the sim itself i’m gathering them from free sources like SRTM1 (30 meters Digital Elevation Model). Those not alway match internal MSFS DEM

Therefore, sunken or overflying pylons are fairly common

INSTALLATION

The downloaded zip contain to main folders:

a-mamudesign-powerlines

a-mamudesign-solarFarms

In Each main folder there is folder called scenery/a-mamudesign-powerlines/scenery

Or scenery/a-mamudesign-solarFarms/scenery/

Those last foldes contain the actual compiled sceneries, in format contryName-placement.bgl and contryName-exclude.bgl

Since the sceneries contains MILIONS of objects placed, if you suffer for slow loading times you can simply delete or rename unwanted countries

DISCORD:

https://discord.gg/DxsrNN95FS

REVIEWS:

Check PIES IN THE SKY TOUR for some wonderful review of this add-on and other great simulation videos

https://youtu.be/YywHpGsX6XI

another great review from flightnews24, always up to date info for the flightsim community!

https://flightnews24.de/2022/01/14/msfs-stromleitungen-und-solarparks/

Another sweet channel, SimFlighPro, thanks for the review!

https://youtu.be/SkRgAu9MofU

And thanks Vasco from MSFS Addons, great words about the Powerlines

https://msfsaddons.com/2022/01/16/this-freeware-mod-adds-powerlines-and-solar-farms-to-microsoft-flight-simulator/