Rick Piper's Hawker Siddeley HS.748 RELEASED!

[timest 473]

Wow this plane is great!! Thanks to the team for a wonderfully rounded out package :)One question, hope it doesn't sound stupid. How do you stop this bird after landing. I couldn't get this sucker to stop. :)Thanks guysTim

[Moose4 0]

Wow.Just...wow. This thing is FANTASTIC. I had fun just mucking around with it, learning my way around, dealing with somehow killing the port engine (and then accidentally hitting upon the right combination to restart it!), and just listening to it. The sound is simply amazing, sliding from that ear-piercing whine of those Dart turboprops at idle to the impressive roar when those props go to full RPM and the plane leaps forw...uh, make that "accelerates forward in a veddy sedate British manner." :) It flies so smoothly, and that VC is wonderful.This and the YS-11 are easily the most unique turboprops modeled in FS. Whoever heard of a turboprop without, y'know, prop controls? :)Thanks very much to all of you. This one is a keeper.Lewis "Moose" GregoryRichmond, Virginia

[Guest rpjkw1155]

It is indeed terrific. I was tooling around with it, shot some touch n goes, and was amazed at how stable and easy to fly it was. Tomorrow I'll get into it more; I want to try the engine out routine I've read about.Great airplane.Bob

[Guest JSPuonti]

Thanks, just wanted to make sure the drivers I was using weren't older than yours. Mine are dated 8th of December 2005, version 5.12.8.1164.

[Guest JSPuonti]

That was a good call!I downloaded the Argosy and replaced the original HS sounds with it and it seems to work! (knocking wood) I did a short 10-minute flight around Seattle, taking off from and landing to KSEA, and the flight was remarkably lacking in reboots ;) I did a lot of switching between different views, too, just to try and eek out a crash from the Argosy soundset, but it just kept on going. Thanks for the tip!Now that I had a chance to fly the HS without interruptions I have to join the others in commending Rick for creating a VERY stable hand flyer. The 748 is an absolute joy to fly and landing at KSEA was easy going with the aid of the PAPI lights alone, sans any automation.It's like the Aero Commanders of Milton Shupe, Scott Thomas and Andr

[Guest]

well I finally got time to start her up and fly... and I too have the blue screen of death. after takeoff i get a weird high pitched sound then the blue screen and a reboot. I have an audigy 4 with the latest drivers....DOH!

[Guest JSPuonti]

Holland Holland's suggestion "fixed" the squeal / BSOD problem for me:1) Go to AVSim's file library and download aw650v1_176829.zip2) Go to your Hawker Siddeley HS-748 installation directory (under /aircraft/)3) Rename "sound" to "sound.original" (or something else of your choosing)4) Unpack the "Sound" directory from the Argosy ZIP file into your HS-748 directory5) Fire up FS!Both the Argosy and the HS-748 use similar (or close enough) Dart engines, so in all likelyhood the slight differences between the two packages won't be a problem for you.On my system atleast the Argosy soundset does not produce a BSOD and I'm able to enjoy the 748 to my heart's content :)

[Guest JSPuonti]

Now that I'm able to fly the 748 without fear of reboots, a procedure question has popped up. I'm having trouble starting the engines up accordingly to the "automated checklist" which you can open via the icon with white horizontal lines running through it.Everything goes ok up until the point where I'm supposed to actually start the engines. When I depress the large starter button, the starboard engine revs up to about 1900 RPMs but the propellers don't turn. I can sit there til the cows come home and nothing happens. If I release the starter button, the RPMs drop to 0.I noticed that if I set the "HP ####" levers to "ON" and then depress the starter button, the engines start as they should. However, this goes against the startup checklist, which specifically states that the HP #### levers have to be in "SHUT" (off) position. If the levers are in the "ON" position the checklist item gets a red X next to it (as in, "not right").The checklist in the kneepad don't say anything about the HP #### levers so I can't verify if this is a mistake in the automated checklist or not. What I'd like to know is, can anyone here start the plane up from dark and cold by strictly following the automated checklist (in other words, with the HP #### levers in "SHUT" aka "OFF" position)?This isn't a huge issue as I can get the plane started and flying as described above, I'm just curious if this is an error in the checklist or an unforeseen user error of some kind.Edit:Looks like the forum's bad words list contains a term I used in the post, replacing it with "####" :) The word in question starts with "c" and is the other name for a rooster - you'll see it in the checklist under the heading "STARTING" and "AFTER START".

[RobdeVries 28]

:) glad to hear the sound problem has been worked around..Both are great planes and if you installed the Argosy (which is also a hoot to fly) just alias the sound.cfg of the HS.748 to the Argosy like this:{fltsim}alias=FSDS2 AW Argosysound<- don't use the brackets but the hook thingies insteadBest!Rob "Holland&Holland" de Vries http://fool.exler.ru/sm/fly2.gif"To go up, pull the stick back. To go down, pull the stick back harder"

[me4246 0]

Hi,Great plane! I was waiting it since a long time.But...when flying it first I noticed that looking at the plane (and at the terrain) from the external point of view (I don't know what's the english version name for the FS2004 menu option) terrain textures appeared completely blurry. I tried to set anything video card related, but no way. When I changed the plane with default Cessna, terrain textures was sharp back again. I tried this a couple of times, and the problem seems related to the plane. What can be the issue? Can the plane influence the terrain appearance?Please helpFrancesco

[Jean-Paul 167]

Hi Francesco,This also happens to me when by night or dusk, I switch the lights on with L. When the lights are off, the ground textures remain sharp.I have an Nvidia 6600 GT video card, how about you ?Jean-Paul

[Guest JSPuonti]

Yes, if the plane takes up a lot of memory and your system is already low on it, FS9 will degrade texture quality so that you don't end up with completely texture-less planes and ground.Keep in mind that each HS-748 repaint takes about 23 megabytes of memory (~5.5 megabytes in the repaint directory + ~17.5 megabytes in the main texture directory), while the default Cessna 172's textures are something like 2.5 - 5.0 megabytes (2.5 in the repaint directory, possibly more in the main texture directory).On top of this comes the model file (2.8 megabytes for the HS-748 vs. 0.8 megabytes for the C172), the panel (16 megabytes for the HS-748 vs. ~1 megabyte for the C172) and the sounds (16.8 megabytes for the HS-748 vs. 11 megabytes for the C172). It all adds up and by the time your HS-748 is loaded, your machine's running out of memory to display textures at high quality.

[Jean-Paul 167]

Hi Janne,I'm running FS with 1024 Ram. I do not think I'm running out of memory because it even happens when the sliders are not all to the right. The plane keeps its textures, but the ground becomes blurred and this happens only by night or dusk when I turn the lights on (maybe dawn too, I didn't try that out yet). When I pause the sim with ALT, the ground textures become sharp again. When I un-pause, the blurries are back.Jean-Paul

[Guest JSPuonti]

I don't know about the dusk / dawn / lights on / off deal, but what the other poster described definitely sounds like a memory issue. The difference in loaded material between the HS-748 and a Cessna 172 is big enough to suggest that, although I don't know how much memory he has. I'm assuming all other factors were the same between the two planes, of course - weather, location, airspeed, date and time of day.EDIT:Interestingly enough, I was almost done with my Bahamasair 748 flight from Nassau to Tampa (not sure how long I had been flying.. somewhere between 1 and 2 hours), being vectored towards Tampa international as I was replying to this thread, when FS9 suddenly ran out of memory and crashed! :DI can't remember when FS9 ran out of memory on my 2GB rig the last time, so this was something of a curiosity. I do know that prior to starting the flight I had been loading up the various 748 repaints and admiring them at Nassau, so maybe that had gradually eaten up my system RAM and lead to the crash a few hours later.Since I was done with the flight, I decided to do a test. I loaded up FS9 and checked its memory usage, which was 61 megabytes at the "Create flight" menu. Loading up the default flight with a C172 at KSEA increased that to 245 megabytes, after which I started to load up different 748 repaints (from top to bottom of the repaint list) to see how it affected fs9.exe's memory usage. Here's what happened:1. load (Cessna): 245 MB2. load (HS-478): 293 MB3. load (HS-478): 311 MB4. load (HS-478): 346 MB5. load (HS-478): 349 MB6. load (HS-478): 367 MB7. load (HS-478): 401 MB8. load (HS-478): 405 MB9. load (HS-478): 424 MB10. load (HS-478): 459 MB11. load (HS-478): 475 MBI didn't feel like going through all 50+ repaints, but this sampling should be indicative of just how quickly RAM gets eaten up if you're checking out the deliveries :)Up until this point I had stayed in the 2D cockpit, so I now switched to spot view:12. spot view (HS-478): 497 MBAnd then on to tower view:13. tower view (HS-478): 502 MBAnd VC:14. VC view (HS-748): 502 MBApparently the VC had already been loaded at some point.Of course, FS9 does release some of the memory it's used up - I noticed that after loading up a new repaint, memory usage shot up and then dropped a moment later. The numbers here are from after the "settling down" took place. Throughout this test the plane was sitting on the runway, so there was no ground texture swapping going on. No doubt that would have gradually eaten up the RAM, too.In any case, before firing FS9 up I had about 1.2 GB of physical RAM available and at the end of this experiment there was 740 MB left. On a 1 GB system FS9 would have ran out of RAM a long time ago, although admittedly I did have a couple of programs running in the background (worth some 200-300 MB of RAM). This should show that 1 GB of RAM is no guarantee for a blur-free FS experience, especially when a new high-quality plane like the HS-748 is released with tons of repaints. It's only natural that you want to check them all out, which lead to my downfall ;) I know the next time I want to take the 748 out for a long flight, I will re-start FS9 and start from a clean plate.Oh, and just to round up the memory test I loaded up the Cessna 172 one final time:15. load (Cessna): 450 MB

[Guest]

ah ha so its not just me who sees the blurries. at first I thought it was Lagos Budapest but it appears to be this airplane. During the day it appears to be fine, but yep, night and dusk and dawn are bad.Thanks for the sound tip, I will use those sounds. Hopefully this can be fixed though as I enjoyed the soundset that came with it!