Pan am, green chili, content, time and technology

Question

pan am is not another cop procedural. Thank goodness. But it's struggling with the expansion of " flight crew" from soap opera to more relevant 'fact of life' re: air travel for first time above prop planes with frequent fuel stops.
In other words, " look down there...wow...no boundry line, no fence between A and B destination... just a big beautiful " world" with farm land, mountains, rivers, woods, and very bright cities... a new world for many .
lots of material if you think about it... and how to focus on that, have a character driven series that branches out to all those aspects of the period ?
I've heard from one poster that its just not his thing. His thing is also not cop shows. His thing is basically nothing out there. Weddings is his thing.
And secret agents who are rogue .... just killing eveyone who isn't honest.  I hope there is a series about that next.
I hope he does the screenplay and produces it and makes a few bucks for the effort if money matters to him.  Probably not.
Green chile, on the other hand, is a couple days in the making. Its not a tv show you watch that takes nothing out of your day or thoughts or actions to " see it on tv ".  You turn on tv and watch pan am. You wanna make green chili, you have to start cooking... and it can take days !
So, now I'm making my world famous green chili ... ( I know at least 4 people throughout the world now who have tasted my green chili ... hence, world famous... )
Famous because it will melt paint off your car if you spill it on the paint.... and kill all germs in your body including cancer... and make you think twice about ever eating it again when you go to the bathroom the next day.
The content of the tv show does matter, as does the chili ( in time... you have to make the stock first for the chili... you have to hook the audience with the tv show ).  Things take time ... and this world used to respect what takes time.
Think of wine and space shuttle and wheat and so on... things take time... good things...
Then again, there's the " paranormal activity part 2 " movie, and other things ... basically coming out of the technology and angst of society using the technology that allows for fun things to be done without the usual investment of larger projects.  This is nothing new. Midnight Cowboy was such a movie. So was a lot of other stuff ( Rambo ? , Dirty Harry ? ).   Do we want " Gone With The Wind" , " Dr. Strangelove", " Once Upon A Time In America", "How The West Was Won" etc... ( lets not forget the "art" stuff.... epics like " Ben Hur" etc ) ... or junky things made to laugh at ourselves and have fun ... like a lot of zombies eating people .... with abandon ! ??? )
I prefer scary snakes myself.. I can't imagine " Zombies On A Plane ".... how would it end ???
But anyway, time and technology , as they make it more possible to actually " shoot " movies etc ( parnanormal thing took what ??? 5 days ? ) .... or as everyone becomes more and more of a " critic" of things (   the definition of a critic is someone who doesnt actually " do " what they are judging.. if they actually " do " what they are judging then they are called fellow ' artists ' ) --- thru technology and time available.. .. are we making better products and having more fun and helping each other out a little bit more ??? 
There I go again.. ranting about art and product and audience and ( although you dont see it ...monetizing it through adverstisements and franchises ) ... and wonder if anyone with a new DSLR bought today will really make a fantastic movie tomorrow.. I hope so !
Count me IN ..... hire me so I can live another day and share my world famous green chili with anyone with an extremely tough hide.  ( and rear end ! )

Answer 1

Yes, back when I started with MS FS (cannot even begin to remember version number), I added a ton of Scenery Packs (many from a magazine called Full Throttle, and also some independent folk), plus a radio add-on, several weather add-ons and some others, that I do not now recall.
As Jeppeson-Sanderson was a client, I picked up a copy of all their charts, and most of the airport manuals (got those cheap, 'cause I bought the discontinued ones for nearly nothing). I'd spend as much time plotting my navigation, as actually flying them. Made it from SFO to HNL several times, and also did a DEN to LHR flight, navigating in about the same path, that UAL flies now (Greenland, Iceland, Ireland).
Back then, the ships that one could fly were rather limited, and I never got into "painting" my planes, or anything like that. Now, in Red Baron, I did create graphics and enemy planes, within Mission Builder. For me, that was where the real fun was - building those missions, and then flying them with the "video camera" on. Back then, there was an active NNTP community for Red Baron, and everyone exchanged missions, plus custom airplane graphics. Some neat stuff, and especially for the time. Now, I took great liberties with my missions, regarding history, as the RAF pilot (mostly in a custom painted Sopwith Camel) encountered the ultimate German aces, and all flying over Great Britian in the best planes that they ever flew - though by that point, some were deceased. Also, few, if any, ever flew over GB, so one would only have encountered them over France, Holland, Belgium or Germany. Still, having 4 top aces attacking you, at night, with GR dirigibles all around, was a tough mission. If one survived, and continued the patrol, they had to face the rest of the GR airforce's best, in waves. I had those missions set to real weather, real fuel, real ammo loads, but others could have gone in and adjusted those settings, with but a little work. Few could ever complete even the easiest, but many tried. Had I not been able to furnish the "camera footage," few would have believed that I could do it. It WAS a bit easier, since I had designed each mission, but after about 10, one tends to forget who attacks you, where and when. Also, if one was a bit slow in dispatching, say the first wave, then it was likely that another wave of GR planes might joing up, since I had them all pretty much on the same vector, so that one would encounter them (no fun if everyone misses each other!) along the patrol's flight path. Also, if one did not navigate well, they could miss all the action, and would then wonder what the big deal was about. I furnished the coordinates of each leg, so one needed to also be looking at the maps, while watching the skies. Just flat great fun. Back then, Red Baron was NOT a multi-player fs, but think that the new one had added that - the one where I couldn't get off the ground, or had my posterior handed to me, by average enemy pilots in inferior planes!
Got to dig into the dusty Hunt Archive of Ancient Computer Games, and see if anything is still around. Unfortunately, much would be on floppies, or diskettes, so I would need to dig up some legacy hardware to even load them, if any would even run on XP-Pro. Some go back to about Windows 2.0, IIRC. Even with Win 3.1.1, I had to use memory managers and special boot discs, just to get enough memory to fly the missions. That was a limitation for some, as folk were not using 24GB of RAM, which was managed well. If Red Baron I and Mission Builder would run on a hot Win7 box, I can only imagine the missions that could be buit. In my case, I used up the full 640K, and then all the expanded and extended memory possible. Someone with only 512MB RAM would be left out from some of the longer missions. I did a few, that were scaled back, for the 512K crowd.
Take care, and watch out - Bogey at 12:00 o'clock, right out of the Sun.
Hunt