Key Terra-Firma 6. Vs. Other Highways Packages.

[mikeevans]

I am trying to find out what others think of the 3RD Party AutoCAD Add-on 'Key Terra-firma'.

I have been using this application for a couple of years and so far the only issue we have had with it is on the Clothoidal radii (Horizontal Geometry section). Key systems are aware that a problem exists in this section and are fixing it for the next release (7).

I am a little confused as to when you need to use these curves, In the 6 years of Highway design in the UK I have never come across this way of horizontal alignment creation only Tangent/Straight curves.

I have recently had some insight into Moss or MX and found that it is not as user friendly as KTF, MX CAD does not use arcs like AutoCAD does and requires a lot of messing around to get an alignment exported. It seems that the Moss/MX application has been made as hard as possible in order to charge the most for training.

MX seems to produce a series of straight lines that create a Proxy object forming a Curve, this proxy is reliant on the full version and having the object enablers installed (Once exploded turns into a Polyline) whereas KTf uses real AutoCAD entities.

Can anyone shed any light into the use of clothoidal curves in Highways?

Has anyone used MX or Moss as well as KTF and can tell me what the main differences, advantages, disadvantages and limitations are?

I prefer KT-firma as it integrates with AutoCAD very nicely and is very easy and simple to use.

[bob.shingler]

Mike,
Clothoidal curves are usually known as transition curves in highway design, admittedly only used on major highway schemes (A & M roads here in the UK) so as a rule are rarely used on the smaller schemes. Put it this way I started out with a County Council 20 odd years ago and had to plot them by hand, moved on to MOSS and created them using that, then to PDS about 12 years ago and never really used them since, mainly because I produce smaller infrastructure works now rather than major highways.

By the way, sorry for the late reply, I only found your discussion whilst searching for some info on KTF.

Bob