Very interesting stuff, this is my home patch! The first shot showing the airport from a southerly direction isn't particularly close-up but I can see the landclass definition is pretty good even from there. The obvious error is that the built-up area at the end of rw27 is too large - Speke merges into Hale village and in actual fact there are fields between them. On the other end at rw09, there is a large industrial estate which is shown by green fields in FTX England. However, the main industrial area of Speke Garston does look pretty well represented from afar. I wonder if the mapping base that the landclass definition was worked out from was a bit old? The second shot I think is overhead West Derby looking south across Queens Drive and Old Swan. But that took me a good 30 seconds to try to assimilate the vector road orientations to match my knowledge of the ground. If I was in an unfamiliar place and flying rather than looking at a static screenshot, would I have been able to determine where I was? I don't think so from that image, but then again I would have more visual references apart from that to work from. The seventh shot o/h Runcorn isn't bad, but the industrial area of Runcorn is depicted as housing. Also the green island in the river isn't there in real life, it's a sandbank in the river. The industrial area on the right though represents Hale Bank quite well. The ninth shot shows the bottom end of Formby and Hightown looking south towards the estuary mouth. The placement of the built up areas is good, but the coastline is scrubland and sand dunes, which is visibly quite different from farmland and fields. In the tenth shot Garston docks can be seen, but the area around it is green fields rather than the housing estate and container depot that is actually there. All in all, I'm more impressed with how the shots look than thought I'd be to be honest. The representation by landclass looks pretty believeable from a distance certainly. The closer in visuals still don't impress me massively. I don't 100% understand how the landclass works, so maybe it wouldn't have been possible to refine it more accurately than has been done.
2 comments:
Very interesting stuff, this is my home patch! The first shot showing the airport from a southerly direction isn't particularly close-up but I can see the landclass definition is pretty good even from there. The obvious error is that the built-up area at the end of rw27 is too large - Speke merges into Hale village and in actual fact there are fields between them. On the other end at rw09, there is a large industrial estate which is shown by green fields in FTX England. However, the main industrial area of Speke Garston does look pretty well represented from afar. I wonder if the mapping base that the landclass definition was worked out from was a bit old? The second shot I think is overhead West Derby looking south across Queens Drive and Old Swan. But that took me a good 30 seconds to try to assimilate the vector road orientations to match my knowledge of the ground. If I was in an unfamiliar place and flying rather than looking at a static screenshot, would I have been able to determine where I was? I don't think so from that image, but then again I would have more visual references apart from that to work from. The seventh shot o/h Runcorn isn't bad, but the industrial area of Runcorn is depicted as housing. Also the green island in the river isn't there in real life, it's a sandbank in the river. The industrial area on the right though represents Hale Bank quite well. The ninth shot shows the bottom end of Formby and Hightown looking south towards the estuary mouth. The placement of the built up areas is good, but the coastline is scrubland and sand dunes, which is visibly quite different from farmland and fields. In the tenth shot Garston docks can be seen, but the area around it is green fields rather than the housing estate and container depot that is actually there. All in all, I'm more impressed with how the shots look than thought I'd be to be honest. The representation by landclass looks pretty believeable from a distance certainly. The closer in visuals still don't impress me massively. I don't 100% understand how the landclass works, so maybe it wouldn't have been possible to refine it more accurately than has been done.
You must have a lot of time on your hands...
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