Hi Chirs and welcome
I've toyed with Plymouth but only superficially.. the odd crane here and there.. a few ships in the dockyard and a few more going out to sea. Portsmouth is an entirely different ball game. The basis of it is PortHigh by Simon Swallow (available at flightsim.com).. initially for FS9 but the latest download has an FSX version too. It add's many of the highrise buildings to Portsmouth as well as Fratton Park, a handful in Southsea plus HMS Warrior, HMS Victory, Semaphore Tower and the sail loft (one of) to the dockyard plus a selection of statics (modern) and an AI (or static) of HMS Ark Royal V. Oh.. how could I forget the Spinnaker Tower too
I've binned the modern frigates and replaced them with ships from my era made by Mike Hudson.. all of which are available at Flightsim.com and others

The remaining dockyard buildings and many of the ones in the city I got from 3D Warehouse and converted them for FSX using ModelConverterX, a freeware utility available on the web. There are a couple of problems.. more than a couple really, with the 3D Warehouse (Sketchup) models. They tend to be much higher detail than necessary for FS which is no bad thing except they eat up resources much quicker than bonafide Gmax/3DS models which are optimised for FS. Some of them don't convert as well as you'd wish. Finally.. and a problem for uploading them again.. is copyright. The models are given away freely to anyone able to make use of them but I honestly don't know where I'd stand with regard to uploading them as part of a FS scenery pack. Most (though not all) of the ones I use are by one author so I guess I could seek his permission if I knew how to get in touch with him.. the downloads have no contact info.
It's sort of an on going project although I'm nearing what my pc can take

In the meantime, if you have nothing at Portsmouth in FSX.. pop to
www.flightsim.com and put Simon Swallow into their search engine. It will pick up the FS9/FSX version of Portsmouth High as well as Gosport for FSX (he didn't do this one for FS9 unfortunately). Additionally.. if you're adept with progs like AIFP, SAMM2 and Instant SceneryV2 (this is payware).. plop Mike Hudson into the search engine at Flightsim.com and download those old RN ships. They're available in FS9 and FSX static and FSX AI

To be honest.. had the ships not been available, I'd not have bothered doing anything like what you see in the shots at Portsmouth. They're a bit ropey compared to a lot of models and they're not particularly accurate (they're not meant to be) but they set the scene.. even though the Portsmouth I've put together is a lot newer and slightly out of era.
Thanks for your kind comments. I may upload bits of it if I can overcome the copyright issue but as I said above, in the meantime.. get Portsmouth High and Gosport for FSX. You'd be surprised what an impact those alone will make
ATB
DaveB
