Alaska, Bering Strait (1955-2018) 1.06

Alaska, Bering Strait (1955-2018) Terrain
April 13th, 2017 (1st Release)
by Menrva

>For Strike Fighters 2: Europe, Recommended Full-5 Merged
This is a complete remake of the DBS terrain made by Major Lee and further tweaked by Wrench.
Wrench kindly allowed me to improve upon his work; the entire map has been retargetized and retiled using a whole new tileset, combining tiles from Brain32 and Stary. Some water bodies, lakes and rivers have been hand-tiled. Most of the terrain has been hand-tiled to a great extent. Numerous target areas have been added in order to expand playability, targets of opportunity and year range.

This terrain features a fresh new 250m resolution heightmap (instead of the stock 500m resolution), allowing for greater details and precision in elevation changes; overall it provides the whole terrain with a better look.

The terrain spans from June 22, 1955 (the date of the first known Cold War incident in the Bering Straits between the U.S. and the Soviets) to December 31, 2018.
I didn't bother to add all of the possible RL airports. However, when compared to the original DBS terrain, this one has a lot more to offer, especially on the Blue Side. The Soviets (Red Side) only have two flyable airfields. Don't even try to fly Red Side long-range bombers from said small airfields. Reason for this is that the original DBS terrain was rather fictional and included airbases which in reality didn't and don't exist. I made major researches and what I am providing here is a realistic representation of the area, given the terrain engine limitations. Anyway, I added some Off Map Airbases for both Blue Side and Red Side; if you have SF2NA, you can benefit from this addition, as long range AI flights can be generated from such airbases.
The area in reality is pretty barren, so don't expect a terrain with much targets. Still, you can enjoy CAS missions at St. Lawrence Island and Lopp Lagoon being invaded by Soviet forces, and the usual dogfights over the Bering Straits.

Ground Objects are not included. You can obtain them from Wrench's original DBS terrain release. Only very few of them should be needed anyway.

>Credits (in no particular order):
-Major Lee, who came up with the idea of recreating such an interesting scenario in the Strike Fighters world.
-Wrench, who kindly allowed me to improve upon his work by giving me a blank cheque and trusting my capabilities. Thank you, sir!
-swambast, who provided me with invaluable help in tracking and fixing common and uncommon bugs.
-gerwin, whose TFDtool has proved to be essential in today's terrain making. If the terrain is pretty accurate to RL it's also because of him. I included his very nice Airfield 7+8 Addon Pack, too.
-mue, for the improved shaders he made, which I have included and reworked for the terrain, and for the tools he made for SF2 modding.
-luk1978, for the snowy runway textures he made for his Korean terrain repaint (unofficially released) and the waternormal bitmap he shared at the SF2 screenshots thread. Your mods are very interesting!
-MigBuster, I have included some of his great hi-res textures for runways.
-Brain32, for the original hi-res DBS tileset he made and which I have expanded with my bad transition tiles.
-Stary, because his tilesets are pure art. I borrowed a TOD and few tiles from his excellent Kamchatka tileset repaint.
-Gepard, for his great tutorials about terrain making, in the SF1 Knowledge Base at CombatACE. It's a gold mine!
-krfrge, who has produced a tutorial for recreating SF2-like planning maps, which prompted me to work on templates and my own high quality planning maps. Thank you very much!
-comrpnt, for his Approach and Airfield Lighting Pack mod packages for SF1 series, which I reworked and included.

Because the original terrain was born from Major Lee and was later tweaked a number of times by Wrench, I included the ReadMe files from the original packages, to the end of giving proper credit to everyone involved directly or not.

>Disclaimer:
This is a freeware; yet it can be redistributed ONLY in other CombatACE mods/mod packages.
Any changes to the terrain package's files and/or any copy-and-paste attempts of their contents are NOT authorized if you plan to release them in other mods. But permission might be granted to those who request it to me at CombatACE.
This terrain may NOT in any way, shape or form be used in any payware additions.