This site has been used a lot by news outlets lately, but I'm looking at the pictures they have in their gallery and thinking about what this kind of thing could do for flight simulation. Hi res photos and elevation data for the whole planet...how cool that would be! Anyone have any thoughts on how feasible it might be for MS to use such data?http://www.earthviewer.com

this has been discussed before. A prominent figure in FS scenery indicated that their 'storage farm' is in excess of 144 terrabytes of information just for the processed imagery and probably double that for the raw data. I think this would be great for FS2k6 - all 7,000 DVD's at a reduced cost of just $675,000 USD. You have to remember that is the preorder only.Sign me up!

Mike,Yes, you are probably right . . .LOL...or at least close, however, FS can take an hint from that and work accordingly. In watching some of the computer generated skies, aircraft, scenery and such from this war's newscasts, it is obvious that FS can go a long way in becoming more real.I do believe it is only a matter of time and computer processor speed which will give us some really cool new items to work with in FS.As when the P I came out, anyone who had a 100m processor was really on the top of the curve . . . and look where we are now. I am sure that by next year, the P 4 3.0? will be down in the bargin basement in price and we will all be opting for a new 4.8 or whatever.Back to the original subject, yeah the earthview stuff is simply fantastic . . . my wife's kids wanted to look up our place to see if they could see our horses out grazing . . .LOL...not sure if they will find that but no doubt it will be pretty close. I can tell you this, if we would have had this kind of intel reports and imagery back in the Vietnam days, the results might have been completely different.Best to allClayGod Bless our troops and our mission.

144 terrabytes!!! Yikes! Still, someday, someday. Remember FS4? It came on a single floppy. That wasn't that long ago. I started off with a 40 MB hard drive, and now you can buy a 1 GB Flash card the size of a postage stamp for your digital camera. Perhaps earthview.com is a hint of what we can look forward to. :)

>This site has been used a lot by news outlets lately, but >I'm looking at the pictures they have in their gallery and >thinking about what this kind of thing could do for flight >simulation. Hi res photos and elevation data for the whole >planet...how cool that would be! Anyone have any thoughts >on how feasible it might be for MS to use such data? >>http://www.earthviewer.com Hi Ken,Today

Just another shot, or two.... (Tom forgive me, but they are hosted on my site.) :)And No he's not a giant standing on the airfield, thats Alfred in his trusty Flying EctoSkeleton hovering at about 1000' AGL. :)http://www.frontiernet.net/~pleatzaw/images/ecto1.jpghttp://www.frontiernet.net/~pleatzaw/images/ecto9.jpg