David Megginson writes: > Sure, but I'm also interested in getting FlightGear set up as a decent > general-aviation FTD -- some of the stuff in the flight schools is > ancient, and FTD's are way overpriced.
For what it's worth, I'm involved in a side project that is using FlightGear + a commercial C172 flight dynamics model + cockpit hardware to hopefully achieve an FAA (and JAR) certified sim by late summer / early fall. The commercial fdm will run as a seperate program in order to avoid GPL issues, but building full featured support for remote FDM's is a really good thing for us I think. Imagine being able to run with the default "stable" JSBSim, or the previous "stable" version, or the one you are currently hacking on, just by restarting the desired fdm process. The current state of this whole project is that we have *many* things done, but we also have a pretty good sized todo list, some items minor, some items fairly major. The commercial C172 does a few things better than us (off the top of my head): - Engine/prop modeling is much closer I think. - Startup sequence and rpm's during the crank are more realistic. - Prop windmills properly in the air if engine off. - It properly models left/right only magnetos. - If you lean out engine in the air it sputters and coughs along which is pretty cool. - Generally the flight modeling seems very plausible (and from my perspective perhaps just a bit better tweaked ... i.e. same effects, but the gains or magnitudes are tweaked a little better.) And a few things that are worse: - Ground handling is nothing to write home about. - There is a severe proplem going to first notch of flaps. Extreme pitch up. You need *full* down trip to fly level with any flaps at all. - Perhaps it is over agressive on climbs, but then again there could be weight and temperature issues which we haven't dug into yet. These negative things will get addressed, but overall, I think the JSBSim and YASim C172's are pretty comperable in quality with this commercial code (which is already part of one FAA certified flight sim.) Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
