Spain and Seaplanes

[pagsab]

Since posting at https://combatace.com/forums/topic/101179-european-air-war-reborn/ my last update on my SF2 hand-tiling project, I have been playing several of my own boardgame conversions on air and naval combat, and then enjoying First Eagles 2 by manually tweaking mission files using location data from Gerwin's invaluable TFD editor so as to create my preferred short range real time wingman missions.  This inspired me to progress to the classic planes of the 1930s, using SF2's built-in mission editor to make things easier.  I have the SF2 Spanish Civil War conversion from 'another place', but the included 1:1 scale terrain seemed rather blurred and bland after the wonderfully detailed FE2 terrains, and it took forever for the slow planes to fly between the scattered airfields.  Inevitably, I wondered whether I could use my hand-tiling techniques to create a reduced scale vignette as a more impressive and playable terrain background for the SCW planes.

 

It soon became apparent that creating height maps manually as I had managed in the flat lands of northern Europe was hopelessly impractical in mountainous Spain.  This prompted me to revisit Baltika's advice in https://combatace.com/forums/topic/80880-te-question-height-map-to-hfd/ regarding manipulation of HFD bitmaps exported from TK's terrain editor.  My naïve earlier efforts to do so using Microsoft Paint had been wholly unsuccessful, but now I tried using GIMP, and found that I could scale down and overwrite the 2000 pixel square HFD bitmap from the SCW terrain as a 1000 pixel square bitmap which re-imported perfectly into a new blank 500 km terrain in the Third Wire editor.  I cut the bitmap import height scale to 5 so as to halve elevations as well, thereby stopping the mountains becoming disproportionately steep.  I later re-did the conversion using the Canvas Size tool in GIMP to add blank space around the reduced bitmap, expanding the new terrain to 700 km square and so stopping the hard-coded 80 km 'wall' in SF2 blocking access to features near the edge.

It was obvious that standard SF2 tilesets intended for automatic terrain generation were far too ham-fisted for my reduced scale terrain, so I decided to re-use the bespoke high resolution tiles and TODs I had created for my NW Europe terrain project, based on Gepard's Battle of Britain tileset.  By using Enhance – Adjust Color – Color Variations in my old copy of Photoshop Elements, I was able to redden my tiles and trees to give a more Mediterranean look, applying the Quick Selection tool beforehand to keep the blue water intact.  I used Gerwin's editor to create a random background of my 8 Field tiles, and then I gradually placed coastal tiles and inland woods, moors and urban areas by flipping back and forth between TFD and HFD views while referring sideways to a big old-fashioned atlas of Spain and a laptop showing zoomable online satellite and elevation maps.  It was then just a matter of pasting in the sea, and refining elevations to remove previous flattening and to fit with my own coastal tiles.  As with my  previous projects, I began with an island, in this case Mallorca which the Republicans abortively invaded in autumn 1936 and which then became a key base for Italian bombing of Republican ports and shipping.  The maps below show that my reduced scale version of the island is at least as geographically accurate as that in the original SCW terrain on the left, despite having only a quarter as many tiles selected from just 54 variants instead of 124.

Years ago in Toledo's military museum I bought a copy of Lopez's illustrated atlas of SCW aviation, and this has several images of the 'hidroaviones' based at locations like Pollenca bay in NE Mallorca.  I could not resist modelling this seaplane base by placing a hidden offshore runway like that which I use in my small grass airfields (by commenting out the ModelName in the runway's TargetType entry).  I already knew that standard land planes can fly (anachronistically) from coastal water, but I was dismayed to find that actual seaplanes moved at no more than a crawl even at full throttle.  I almost gave up in frustration when multiple attempts to solve the problem by tweaking the Landing Gear entries at the end of the aircraft data files caused the seaplanes to explode instead!  Trial and error at long last yielded the solution – changing the HideGearNode entries for the main gear to True.  Tail gear entries may be left as is, with the various lines relating to tail gear steering and brakes like those for the Arado 95W added in if necessary to allow seaplanes to land and taxi effectively.  The picture below shows my big CANT Z.506 Heron flying triumphantly over Pollenca bay, with the coastal hangars just visible above the cockpit and the Tramuntana mountains looming in the background.

Having refined my new techniques with Mallorca, I can now create a vignette of similar size to my 45 by 32 tile Kent and Pas de Calais terrain, this time covering the Avila-Toledo-Guadalajara triangle which includes the key battlegrounds around Madrid.  Lopez's book has some very useful maps showing the dozen or so historical airfields in this area, and modelling these will allow a wide variety of short SCW missions to be flown using the vignette alone.  Thereafter, my belated discovery of how to use GIMP to resize and reshape HFD bitmaps has very welcome implications for the future of my other hand-tiling projects in NW Europe and the Baltic.  By differential rescaling I can now easily remove the longitudinal distortions which I find so off-putting in published terrains.  Although some HFDs like EuroWW2 are disfigured by excessive flattening, correcting this is far easier than adding new HFD data manually as I had planned.  Combining hand-tiling using bespoke tilesets with properly proportioned reduced scale HFDs from existing terrains offers a much more practical way forward for the gradual expansion of my various projects from the initial vignettes.  Being able to take off and land in the seaplanes which were such an evocative feature of early aviation is only the icing on the cake!

 

If anyone would like a more detailed step-by-step guide to any of the techniques I have discovered, please let me know and I will try to help.  (Site rules preclude me posting my files, due to my routine cannibalisation of existing resources for my own private use.)