Does the A380 feel too small?

[lucacollins]

Hey all,
I could be completely wrong here, but I feel like the A380 is a little underwhelming in the game. When I say this, I mean that when I was expecting it to dwarf every other plane, as it does in real life. But when it came the 777-300 in my airport looked far bigger and better. I think the problem comes from the fuselage, and as we know the A380 has the largest cross-section of any airliner, especially over the wings.

Here’s a screenshot from Melbourne airport, a Singapore Airlines 777-300 next to a QANTAS A380, notice the size of the fuselage at the back of the wings, and just the width compared to the narrow 777.

click on the image to see the full thing
Now here’s one from in game, with the 777 longer and even the same, if not wider fuselage.

As I’m writing this, I’m thinking to myself: “am I stupid, it doesn’t look that different does it?” However, I think in the game the A380 should be your biggest and most prized possession. I know Gatwick had to build individual stands to accommodate Emirates A380’s, even after they were already flying their 777’s there, and I think this is an example of that. Likewise, in one of my own airports I had a large stand with no jetbridge, and the passengers were boarding the 380 on stairs… so I think it should at least require jetbridge support, or different types of stair trucks.

Again, my central “problem” is how underwhelming the A380 is in game, and as an absolute beast in real life I wish I felt lime that in game.

This is just my opinion and as I said, I could be dead wrong. This is in no way a game issue, but I wouldn’t be mad if the devs increased the size just a tad!

Very intrested to hear your thoughts… Am I stupid for thinking this??? Let me know!

[fredehorn]

You are right indeed, they don’t LOOK too far apart from each other. To prove myself wrong I did the most obvious thing that just came to my mind, I took a ruler and measured both planes on my screen manually. I do have to say that the dev’s seem to have done a pretty good job here. The actual fuselage width of the A380 IRL is 7.14m compared to 6.20m on the 777. I knew it couldn’t be that much of a difference because the most common configuration in economy class is a 3-4-3 seating for both. And what can I say, the manual measurement results are 0,7cm width for the A380 and 0,6cm for the 777, which is just the right scale. The overall effect that the A380 looks a bit wider could be because of the fact that the 777-300 is actually 1,14m longer than the A380.

[lucacollins]

so you think it’s perfect how it is?

[andyc]

The A380 is wider but not longer than any other aircraft. Airbus designed the wings already for a longer A380 model. So the current A380 has oversized wings for the rest of it’s body. This makes everyone thinking that every part on it should be bigger. Like an optical illusion.

For the width I think it fits perfect. Comparing your two pictures, the Quantas A380 crosses the light at the bottom while the 777 doesn’t. Same distance is in ACEO withe the red line at the top.

[fredehorn]

Perfect in a way as it seems like the dimensions are correctly simulated at least… The overwhelming size of the A380 is probably much easier to display in a full 3D environment than in a view only from above.

[Rubble]

As @fredehorn says it is more of an we only have top down view. In the real world the 2nd deck to make it look and stand out as much larger. We can only try and approximate that top down. I also use supplied documentation from Boeing and Air Bus. While I don’t control the scale in game, I do work to scale reference dimensions.

[HelterSkelter]

I think the problem is the general scale of the planes (and runways ) they will look too small as soon as you start building a medium size airport. I understand the devs point of view, the map would be just too small to accommodate them, you would need a runway of at least 3,5 km to have an A380. I really hope that maybe if they find a way to load the saves faster they will decide to increase the world size and in that case maybe increase the size of planes too…at the moment when you see landing an A380 in a “tiny” runway is a bit sad…

[JuliusTheCanadianAv]

Fully loaded A380 needs 3200 meters of runway, it is impossible currently to do such long runways in game as there’s no space to get new lands and FPS would’ve been horrific,I think, some changes will be coming slowly but surely… once we get more land to buy and even better performance update (so we can handle all of it) were going to get overtime realistic runway sizes, new upgrades like EMAS, threshold, ILS etc etc (prob for Alpha 36)

[HelterSkelter]

I wouldn’t be so sure about this. Even if buy more land, you still have one major problem: plane scale.
If I am not mistaken, all planes are (sadly) 30% smaller than real life so even if you manage to build a runway 3,2 km you will have achieve that “wow factor” because all the planes are small.

I would rather have less passengers in the airport but have planes scaled properly.
That’s just my opinion and unfortunately we’ve seen only games where you can build just tiny things: a tiny city (Sim City), and a tiny airport with a tiny runway and planes…

[lucacollins]

I agree with that, I’d like to see properly scaled aircraft.

[fredehorn]

I totally agree with you and I have shared my thoughts about the scale of planes and runways more than half a year ago in a post before large aircraft and runways were implemented.
I don’t mind the scale for the planes as much as runway length bothers me. Not only is it far from reality that medium planes take off or land on a 800m runway for instance, but a 800m runway in game it is actually just 400m (100 tiles) long. That means that the runway scale is reduced to less than 1:4 to what’s actually required (1800-2000m).
But I also think that a scale of 1:1 especially for runways would have a very bad impact on the game due to the game speed. A large runway with realistic length would be about 700 tiles (2800m) long. With the current game speed it would probably take more than one hour taxi time even with a very straight forward airport design. But as it is right now it’s just too short for my taste too so I would like too see a scale of about 1:3 for runways and a slightly reduced game speed. That should still give a good balance and look a lot more realistic. If we get bigger maps in the future that definitely needs an adjustment.

[HelterSkelter]

I agree @fredehorn but the time is clearly something that is totally unbalanced in the game (so far). I am sure that time will be fixed. Even with the current really small runways, if you expand the game world just a bit, planes take an enormous amount of time to taxi.

Another aspect that shows that the time is currently unbalanced is turnaround times. They are way too long because time passes too quickly.

[JuliusTheCanadianAv]

All aircrafts are made according to blueprints/ airport manuals and are properly scaled, I don’t know what are y’all talking about

[HelterSkelter]

@JuliusTheCanadianAv Planes are 30% scaled down compared to the rest of object in the game.