Thamiel

I keep hearing that mantra over and over again, it almost sounds like an urban legend.

The crucial thing is that they were all different. There was no single standardized water tower as the map suggests. Especially not in East and West.

Yeah, my mistake, confused it with the Hochmoselbrücke.

... as it was build, finished and opened for traffic in 2019. The whole highway E42 as depicted in the map did not exist during the 80s. Maybe that saves some space available for other things.

No prob. Personally, I would applaud a glider mod for DCS, but Im afraid the core would not support the finer details of it like moving air masses, judging from the current behavior of wake turbulences staying in place and such things.

Those air race cones esp. feel out of place when located in the Rhine as that is a densely trafficked waterway with ships and barges passing by both ways every minute. Ludwigshafen/BASF would be furious if their replenishment was blocked by some guys in fancy aircrafts flying low around Koblenz. Which takes me at surprise are those strange little details added to the map without any need to do so while breaking the immersion of what Germany looked like. Who on earth would raise an captive hot air balloon some 100 ft above the ground to stay there? Thats what they did in WWI to block gun runs. I strongly hope they will disappear with the next update along with those cones, windmills and inflationary water towers. One would think that Ugra had some advisors and lots of source material available to prevent those mishaps during design.

The two major problems with castles (and with almost all german monumental landmarks for that matter) are: they are all unique and there are so many of them. Its kind of an uncanny valley to see a known landscape representing itself just nearly like the real deal.

The whole Middle Rhine Valley suffers by this neglect.

I suspect, these are relics of an automated conversion process of sat images to ground textures. My home town is missing as well. But at the correct location you find brown lines and rectangles in the green accurately defining the actual streets and buildings.

Its not. Thats the core of the problem. If it would be repetitive, you would recognize it at once and could simply say "Ah, thats not my region, thats a placeholder they will improve on it." Instead it could be and looks like the real thing. But you know it isnt, because you know the real thing for sure, because you live in it. It breaks the immersion on a much deeper level if it looks like it could be, but you know it isnt.

I suspect, the reason the Autobahn was modelled with street lighting was the relative absence of performance hungry cars / traffic. Otherwise, you would not recognize them at night. Also observing the countryside these days, I realized that the "size" of forests on the map is very much caused by its monoton green. In RL, forest areas show multiple shades of green because of different types of trees. That breaks monotony and large areas of forests into smaller ones. We all know and do compare to the real thing. But then again, Ugra should have been aware of that in the first place.

The aeronautical charts used by the A-10 and Gazelle at least are modern RL based and dont reflect the state of the map.

The whole Mosel valley from Koblenz up to Trier is devoid of its settlements. The slopes of the valley are simply left green or show forests instead of vineyards and cramped villages stuffed into the small spaces between the steep flanks of rock and the river. One could wonder why there is a road following down the riverline. No Traben-Trarbach / Mont Royal Kaserne, no Cochem and as a result no historical landmarks of the region like the Marksburg:

The highway bridge of A61 is definitely not of the cold war era. The other stuff most certainly is. For the Koblenz region, the Fernmeldeturm Koblenz would be a nice landmark to have as well.

Ok, lets start: Please remove those greenish, rusty, american style metal, elevated water towers. Far too many and too middle-west american. Furthermore, I really dont think that GDR and FRG used the same manufacturer of those . Scale those churches down. You may find churches with more than one belltower in big cities as center of an episcopal see perhaps - not in 08/15 villages in the woods far away from any major city. Same goes for industrial centers esp. with those high chimneys smoking in the middle of nowhere. Where do all the people live who work there? In the woods?? You will not find that many windmills in the netherlands, let alone germany. On the other hand, there are important landmarks (for an aviator at least) you didnt include, but which (at least to my understanding) could easily represented just by one or two instances of their class: e.g. "Fernmeldetürme", castles and so on. And at last, but I understand that this is something of a performance bottleneck: the map is not as densely populated as it should be. This is just my impression of 1 hour flying the Rhine and Moselle from Spangdahlem to Koblenz and South: nicely done forests, green land everywhere .... and no villages. The whole rhine valley from Koblenz down.... empty. Since the middle ages that region was a centerpoint of political struggles with commerce prospering through shipping and agriculture and it shows until today. The rhein castles are known since romanticism. The whole moselle valley is lined by vineyards - and the families of those winemakers formed wealthy communitites and villages at the border of the river from Trier up to Koblenz. But no vineyards there.