Power Lines and Solar Farms

When you fly VFR, in real life, being near the ground leads to lot of dangers.

One of the most common one is the possibility you get caught in a power line (electricity transmission line).

MSFS has powerlines pylons, but no wire between them.

With my addon I added the wires between each pylon for high voltage power lines (more than 60k volts).

Actual POWERLINES coverage includes:

Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic (Czechia), Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Hungary, Belarus, Austria, Serbia, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Norway, Ireland, Croatia, Moldova, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia, Montenegro

and

Australia!

versione 0.9.5 contains also

USA, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, Japan

SOLAR FARMS Coverage:

Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain, Benelux, Danmark and Canada

=+United States and Greece from 0.9.7 update

The project coverage is gonna increse overtime

With this addon, along with my other add-on Project Lifts and the spectacular We love VFR by Puffinflight, the long time ago request:“Please add powerlines, gondalas, mast” from the MSFS Wishlist has been fulfilled, for free, by independent developers. Hey Asobo, that is 2 person work

FEATURING:

The project use Open Street Map data (the same source of Microsoft) for pylon placing

Each “line” (way) of the trasmission grid has a specific “voltage” and “number on cables” in the OSM data, i have assigned specific pylon and number of cables by using those value

if nr. of cables is not indicated, lines up to 140k volts get 3-wire, line between 140k and 280k get 4-wires and lines above 280k volts will get a 6-wire setup (OSM data also has nr. of wires data, but is quiete unconsistent, so this is the deal)

To spice things up, and provide additional realism, I have crossed Powerlines data with Airports, major roads, rivers, and digital elevation model (SRTM1).

In this way i can detect where to place white and red marker balls for the cables and red/white painted pylons

Rules as folow:

Within Airport boundaries no pylons or wires are allowed

From each runways threshold, in an area 1500 meters long and 300 meters wide, powerline will have marker balls and red white pylons

When a wire cross a major river or major road marker balls are placed

Also, when a wire crosses a a major valley marker balls are placed (more that 50 meters from the bottom of the valley to the base of the pylon, this make the ground-wire clearence to about 70/90 meters)

All the above rules may not follow individual countries regulations, but you know, is not a “Cable simulator”!

I did not notice any major FPS impact

SOLAR FARMS

Another thing that the sim was missing was Solar Panels / Solar Farms

So i did them! Basic implementation, but no more empy black-bluish fields

The data source is of course the Open Street Map database. When a single panel is mapped i’m placing it accordingly, while if an entire solar farm is mapped as an entire “area”, i’m filling it with regular patterns

I’m still working on the placing routines / solar panels aspect, so a limited number of countries is provided

Over extremely large solar farms, if too close, fps is gonna lower a bit.