[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > In the article i read the following: > "In fact, flight characteristics are calculated in real time from aircraft > design data, not static tables like MS Flight Simulator." > > What way does Flightgear use? > Static tables or real time calculations or something other?
X-Plane's approach is interesting and novel, but far from perfect. You could think of it like a virtual, real-time wind tunnel. However, because of the computational complexity of flight, x-plane can only impliment an extremely crude and rudimentary wind tunnel. It has to fill in scads of approximations and assumptions to get everything to work. That said, it is still an interesting and useful approach for some situations and you can use it to build flight models that behave reasonably well for most type of aircraft. I don't mean to sound negative here, most of the time you only hear the hype, "blade element theory", etc. etc. so I wanted to also present the other side as well. The downside to this approach is that in order to get your design to behave like the real thing, you have to go in and tweak a lot of non obvious parameters in non-obvious ways and deal with a lot of non-obvious interactions and side effects. Building an aircraft in X-plane that hits the real world numbers exactly is a little bit like voodoo. But if you are building some brand new design in your garage and want to know how it will fly (and don't have access to a real wind tunnel or super computer cluster) X-Plane will probably make a better guess at it than anything else available to an average person. It's like anything else ... x-plane has a particular approach to the problem of modeling flight. It shines in some areas, but has it's share of problems too. But like any approach, you can usually find ways to get around the weak spots to get something useful done. Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities curt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org 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
