Located in the Pacific Ocean near California the Stennis is a super carrier that will test the endurance and skill of any pilot. The ship’s four catapults and four arresting gear engines enable her to launch and recover aircraft rapidly and simultaneously and these are shown beautifully in the FS2000 depiction of her.
Installing the carrier is relatively painless. Its a simple unzip and then copy and paste files into their associated folders in the main flight simulator directory. There are no flatten or exclude switches to confuse you. No extra files just a straightforward scenery and texture install. This is one of the many great qualities of the scenery.
On final to the deck you almost feel like you are landing on a real carrier. The texture work is superb and really shows the immense work put in by Javier Fernandez, the scenery creator. If you were ever looking for a carrier that really pushed your gaming experience we would defiantly have to recommend this one.
After landing and coming to a heart stopping halt on the flight deck take some time to look around. Look at the detail on the control centre. Look at the mules as they sit beautifully upon the deck but don’t get too carried away. Once you finally master the challenge of landing on the Stennis you’ll only want to do it again and again. As night falls upon the Stennis your jaw will drop once more. The night lighting is again second to no other carrier available for flight simulator.
The hardware issue that impressed me was the fact that I had tweaked my settings to make the game run a little smoother by lower texture quality etc and I didn’t notice much of a difference in the detail of the carrier. It looked wonderful all the time. Unfortunately there are a few things that can let the carrier down.
I found on test flights for circuits that the deck was a bit to short for some carrier-based aircraft such as the F-14 and the FA-18. This gave me some problems to overcome but I did so, you must slew back a little way from the start position then hit full throttle and zoom off the deck. I also found there were problems with the start location. After selecting the carrier as my airport I discovered that I was actually sitting on the water in the middle of the carrier but after slewing up on to the deck I was ready to go.
If you ever wanted to know how Tom Cruise felt in Top Gun I certainly recommend this scenery. Once you resolve the minor bugs such as the strange start location and take off position you will certainly enjoy it. If you’re still not sure check out the screen shots and then decide. We think you’ll agree this is a classic piece of freeware flight sim scenery.
FS Planet rating: 5/5
