Ketchikan Harbor is a scenery enhancement that provides a significant amount of extra detail in the Ketchikan Harbor area as well as Eagle Air, a fictitious floatplane tour and charter service, that specializes in flying to RTMM scenery locations.
The Ketchikan Harbor scenery adds a small commercial dock/float plane area (boardwalk/pilings etc.) just southeast of the 5KE water runways and just off the bow of the cargo/freighter ship docked to the northwest of all of the cruise ships. This is where Eagle Air can be found. In addition, scenery objects have been added around the freighter cargo dock and additional buildings and trees have been added surrounding the general harbor area and, also in downtown Ketchikan. The intent of the building additions in downtown Ketchikan was to diminish the glass and steel look and add more color both in the daytime and at night which is how Ketchikan downtown actually looks.
For those of you who can fly with good frame rates in PAKT with SP1, this scenery addon should work well. In order to minimize the hit to frame rates, I limited the number of addon larger buildings along the edge of the coast to just the immediate area around Eagle Air. Dieter Linde, one of the beta testers, has reported no significant loss of frame rates on his rig. But of course, each individual rig will vary on a case by case basis. There are two .bgls provided and one of them can be dropped to help improve frame rates, if necessary, while still providing the immediate Eagle Air surroundings. You would however, lose the freight dock enhancements, the downtown Ketchikan enhancements and scattered scenery objects.
Eagle Air is a great place for your floatplane to depart from on its daily schedule of tours/charters and then return in the late afternoon. Download the Ketchikan Harbor today and try it.
IMPORTANT: Ketchikan Harbor scenery enhancement requires that the FSX Mesh Resolution be set to exactly 5m....the ORBX standard. Any more or less will blow up the scenery boardwalk which is sitting on the bumpy shoreline and very sensitive to mesh resolution.
This scenery enhancement requires FSX Acceleration and the ORBX PAKT with SP1 scenery product as well as two publicly available object libraries listed in the readme. This scenery addon does not change or move any ORBX files and no ORBX objects were used in its creation.
See screenshots below:
Ketchikan Harbor
Eagle Air & Boardwalk Area:
Tongass Ave. behind Eagle Air
Eagle Air & Boardwalk Area at dusk:
Ketchikan Downtown
Ketchikan Downtown at night:
As you can see, the added detail is fully lighted and looks beautiful at night together with ORBX's PAKT SP1 product. A nighttime flight up the PAKT Harbor coast is a must with this enhancement.
I would like to thank Dieter Linde, Robert Abernathy and Brad Allen for their feedback, suggestions and beta testing during the development of the Ketchikan Harbor scenery enhancement.
Ketchikan Harbor is now available in the Scenery section of the RTMM libraries.
Enjoy!
Rod "Stiletto2" Jackson