Gibraltar Bridge

By Phil Colvin (28 March 2004)

an you imagine a structure nine miles long, with super massive towers three thousand feet high? An edifice so gigantic that the entire island of Manhattan would not be sufficient to contain it? A structure that would make all the worlds greatest ships and skyscrapers seem puny? One erected at what the ancient Greeks considered the ends of the earth? Spanning the strait of Gibraltar, the world's busiest trade route to and from eastern Euprope, and uniting the nations of Spain and Morocco, the Gibraltar bridge, now under consideration as a project of fifteen billion dollars cost, would be an unprecedented engineering marvel and a new icon of the twenty-first century. An engineer named Charles Seim, with TY Lin International in San Francisco, can not only imagine it, he's planning it. The length of cables alone in such a project would total thirty times the circumference of the earth, and its road surfaces would be made of spun fiberglass five times stronger than concrete.

Holy cow, would not such an object be a blast to have as an add-on to Flight Simulator? Developer Soeren H. Nicolaisen thought so too! And I only wish any of the default bridges in FS2004 were as nice as this one. He really did a super job. These screen shots will only give you a taste of it; you've got to see it from within the sim. It's tremendous fun to have an object of this size to fly over, under, around and through with any of your favorite aircraft, and it's located in a very scenic part of the world.

Speaking of scenic, although Microsoft did a fair job overall with this area, there is a rather glaring omission. I'll give ya a hint: nothing there for Prudential investors to own a piece of! That's right, there's no Rock of Gibraltar, just flat land around the airport. Fortunately, developer Michael Magner has remedied this with his Gibraltar scenery download, which works in both FS2002 and FS2004. And his Rock of Gibraltar stays visible for many miles, which I really appreciate. Incidentally, you'll need to slew yourself over to the runway if you choose his airport from the go-to menu; it's somewhat offset from the default location.

So then, having installed the Rock and thus enabling a properly scenic takeoff from LXGB, we take up a heading of 217 degrees, and as we traverse the harbor, there in the distance we see....nothing! And there we have the only major snag in an otherwise superb download. Even with the sliders maxed out, on my system (P4 2.4 Northwood on dual channel board, 1G DDR-400 ram, 128 meg GeForce FX 5600) I couldn't see it till I was nearly across the harbor, and then it popped into existence as if a cyber-genie had snapped his fingers. To see something that big suddenly loom before you rather than to espy it from afar is definitely an attention-getter. However I can imagine that Mr. Nicolaisen had to make a lot of tough choices working within the constraints of the sim and current hardware. Oh well, you can always cut your visibility settings to compensate. Anyway, once you see it you're still far enough away to take in the entire span at a glance, and you get a feeling you're approaching something very big indeed. This is reinforced by how long it takes to get there, even though it already seems big!

And when you get there, even though there's much to explore in a very slow aircraft like the Piper Cub, if you're like me the first thing you'll want to do is high-speed aerobatics all around the thing, like a kid with his own roller coaster. Even in a jet fighter the height of those towers and the time it takes to surmount them is impressive, as is diving from there three thousand feet down to the traffic on the roadway. And there is traffic there. Many kinds of vehicles, street lamps and road signs are among the objects you'll encounter. And the underside is also nicely detailed, especially the colossal foundations of the towers, surrounded by fantastically oversized barrels, I presume to bar collisions with the heavy traffic of the sea lanes below. There's also an approaching ocean liner in the package, which further enhances the sense of scale.

There's only one thing about this download I wish were different: ya can't land on it! Who just said bridges weren't designed for that, I don't wanna hear it! But it probably would have been a lot of extra work for Mr. Nicolaisen (or maybe he's just more sensible than me), and I don't want to look a gift bridge in the mouth. This is one fun piece of eye-candy.

Phil Colvin
gimpyfoot1@yahoo.com

Download Soeren H. Nicolaisen's Gibraltar bridge
Download Michael Magner's Gibraltar scenery

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