Carsten.Hoefer wrote: > Forgetting about all 'unsafe' situations in helicopters, do we have > one in flightgear? Is it possible to model one with the existing > flight models we use?
Not without a lot of code work. Helicopters have a bunch of effects that don't exist in the current FDMs. Things like asymmetric lift effects would need to be revisited. Both YASim and JSBSim model "P factor", which is what the same effect is called on a fixed wing propeller aircraft, via a hack that isn't general enough to handle ~90 degree AoAs. Other stuff, like blade flapping and precession of the main rotor just don't exist and would need to be done from scratch. For myself, I don't find PC simulation of helicopters very interesting. Existing throttles don't have anywhere near enough precision to simulate a collective, IMHO. Helicopter pilots maintain altitude by feeling for very slight changes in vertical acceleration and adjusting with tiny movements of the collective. There's no way we can simulate that well. We could do it with an autopilot like device, of course, but where's the fun in that? You might as well just install "Commanche MCMXIV" or whatnot to get same level of simulation realism. :) If you want to try hovering in FlightGear, try the Harrier. That thing is really difficult to hover, for all the same reasons that the real aircraft is difficult to hover. Andy -- Andrew J. Ross NextBus Information Systems Senior Software Engineer Emeryville, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nextbus.com "Men go crazy in conflagrations. They only get better one by one." - Sting (misquoted) _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
