Hi guys,
I feel somewhat obligated to write a little bit about this work and why it takes so darn long.
At that time we met at the airshow, I was working on the Electra for about a year and what Ian saw was something like this:
This Electra already had a couple of neat features. Ian mentioned the icing:
However, at some time I hit some sort of mental obstacle and had to do something else for a change. I started working on a Bleriot XI, and as this little side-project continued, it grew more and more complex:
You might notice the difference in the quality of the model/textures. The huge benefit of this project was that I could try out some new techniques in modelling, texturing and programming. A couple of months back I wanted to apply this new techniques to the Electra which led me to start with this project all over again. At present this FS aeroplane has NOTHING in common with the original model. Nevertheless the modelling part is almost done by now to the extend that I started to work on the first realistic repaint that had to be one of a New Zealand airline. I chose the ZK-AFD for a couple of reasons. The "Kuaka" was one of the first Lockheed Electras to fly in New Zealand and wasn't involved in a fatal accident. I understand that parts of the fuselage are stored at MOTAT and the museum also have the ZK-BUT ("spirit of the Tasman sea") on display, but repainted her to show the paint scheme of the Kuaka.
Even though I try to create a proper representation of the real aircraft, there are a couple of things that differ from the original ship. Of course high frequency communication was years away when these planes were used, however for flight simmers convenience I had a VHF radio apparatus installed.
The setup of the antennas follows partly the installation on Amelia Earharts Electra. There is a ventral aerial, a dorsal V-antenna, a trailing antenna that can be extended up to 250 feet and a loop antenna for direction finding. This is high-tech stuff, the first Electras to fly in New Zealand just had a trailing antenna, no DF equipment and communication was done by Morse code.
Please note that basically everything is WIP here. The colors are not quite right, there are some ugly edges on the red "arrow" between the nose- and the cockpit section of the fuselage, the specular map needs another update andsoonandsoon...
The cockpit fr the model 10 A is also almost finished by now. And again, this is a completely new model than what you saw a year ago!
I finished programming of all the cockpit animations, however the biggest chunk of work is still to come...
So..... yep that's about it. And please don't expect that baby to be published soon. It is still a looooong way to go.
All the best,
Vitus
Posted: Mon May 09, 2011 10:24 pm
, the little extra's and the original scheme 
.... and for jeepers sake leave that dang Bleriot alone 
we need to get passengers across the strait