The flight gear issue the bothers me most is that whenever flying at high altitude, with an airliner for example, I am flying above a big square and I see small squares being loaded in front of me while other small squares are removed in the back and this really ruins the immersion.
Even if I greatly increase the LOD (which "kills" my hard drive and makes everything run very slow because even though I have enough ram the hdd is 5400rpm) there is still a straight line at the horizon and then that white sphere.
In x-plane they have a simple solution for this: a global low resolution texture and mesh that is loaded at start for all the planet and the higher resolution textures are loaded on top on that and not on top of some white cloud sphere like flightgear earth looks by default.
Because this low resolution texture is far away and usually covered by clouds and other lights effects it blends very well with the high resolution one and you can't see the difference.
Also, sometimes terrasync stops working and after a long flight you have to abort because you don't have anywhere to land, with a basic low resolution texture you could still land on some green stuff when you arrive there.
A 3d mesh is not absolutely necessary, a 2d sphere with a earth texture would still be better than how things look right now.
A vector image used as a texture would take very little memory if it can be used.
Also users could choose different textures/meshes for this depending on how much memory they have.
Could this be done?
I see that there is already a textured sphere for when you are in space but that is disabled when you are not in space.