I don't know if this has been suggested before but there are some threads I've seen before about the fleet A340-600 and how some pilots would like to use the PSS A340-300 instead... Well, I was idly checking out various aircraft in my FS9 installation today and I suddenly realised that the PSS A330 and A340 are almost identical aircraft ! Yes, I know many of you will be saying "Doh! Tell us something we didn't know..." but bear with me...
The Airbus A330 and A340 share almost identical airframe and wings, the main difference being the two versus four engines (see
www.airliners.net for more details
)
So, this fact is reflected in the design of the PSS A330 and A340 down to the fact that they share (almost) the same texture bitmaps... In fact if you look in the texture folders of the House A340 you'll see that the main bitmaps are called PSS33_main_t and wing330_t. Yup, you're way ahead of me here - PSS have used the same texture maps for both planes with a slight variation for the engines (as there are more of them on the A340...
)
So what, I hear you cry...!!
Well, a few swift experiments have proved that you can copy the EHM PSS A330 texture folder directly into the PSS A340-300 and - hey presto - you have a EuroHarmony A340 with proper panel, VC etc. I've had to alter the engine texture (by copying itself on the same bitmap and changing the bmp name to CFM rather than _RR as the A340 appears to only recognise CFM engines) so that four engines show up but otherwise the A330 textures work brilliantly... (And purists will notice the writing on the fuselage telling you it's an A330 :% )
OK, OK, it's not the A340-600 but in a previous post Robert said the fleet A340 was not well used, so I figure if this might encourage some pilots to fly one of our (very expensive
) planes more, then a little loss of realism is a fairly small price to pay..?
I certainly hope this line of thought doesn't upset anyone, especially not Robert who is quite properly in charge of any fleet adaptations, but I had a bit of a brainwave and wanted to share it, hopefully for the benefit of other PSS users...
