Steve Hosgood wrote:
Interactive history is certainly far better than dry facts in books, but we'd have to be careful how we "spread historical information".
FlightGear might well be a great means of keeping the historical flying experience alive. The trouble is, AFAIK *no* airplane currently modelled in FlightGear has ever been verified against the original machine.
I'm *not* knocking what Josh has done here - nor of course anyone else's
efforts. FlightGear is great for all those people who (like me) cannot
afford to pilot real aircraft, or who just don't want to. However, we
can't ignore the fact that, good though it may be, FlightGear is
basically a video game.
I'm not disagreeing, but I would like to point out that FlightGear has a lot of stuff built in for those that want to move beyond a simple video game.
There are hooks and facilities to connect FlightGear up to realistic cockpit controls, switches, etc., and connect up to lights, gauges, etc. A cockpit mockup with the displays and controls in the correct locations goes a long ways torwards turning FlightGear into a legitimate training tool. We have the ability to syncronize multiple display channels, which allows people to design advanced visual systems with wrap around screens. FlightGear can drive projectors or monitors which gives you a lot of flexibilty to create a display system appropriate for your particular needs and budget.
As "shipped" you are right, but there are a lot of hooks built in which allow you to use FlightGear in much more serious and professional settings.
[ I take it, Josh, that I'm right in assuming that you've not flown a
real B29? Nor even put an accurate model of a B29 in a wind tunnel to
check how well the FDM is doing its stuff? :-) ]
To be fair to Josh, this is big reason why big full motion simulators for a specific aircraft cost millions of dollars. The flight dynamics data (and the work to get it and validate it) alone can easily exceed a million dollars.
We are all doing the best we can. In the case of the B29, I'm sure the hope is to simply get as close as reasonably possible. Unless someone with a few million dollars laying around wants a perfect simulation of a B-29. In that case I can hook you up with some contacts. :-)
That's not to be taken as a complaint, but if we don't make people aware
of this, then in 100 years time they'll be trying to re-enact battles of
WWII using your B29 model on "FlightGear 29.2.1 for HoloDeck" and
wondering why the bomber jocks of WWII claimed certain feats which they
can't duplicate in 2105. So they'll rewrite history books to reflect
what the HoloDeck simulation showed (the historical accounts obviously
being exaggerated!), and they'll be wrong.
What happens in 2105 I'm sure will depend on how the future historical writers want to slant the past, and what point they want to make. Oh and don't forget that "stupid" is hereditary. :-) I'm sure it will exist in 2105 with very similar proportions to today. :-)
There was an aviation accident where people were "hurt". This led to the inevitable lawsuits. The plaintif's lawyers found a simulator of the same type of aircraft and flew into the flight regime in question and made some observations about the aircraft's behavior in that regime. In this lawsuit, the defense brought in their own expert to testify about how the real aircraft would behave, which was different from the results in the sim. The plaintif's lawyers pressed said expert witness on the point, at which time he revealed that he was the one who developed the flight dynamics for said simulator, and the regime the plaintif was exploring was outside of the realm where data was taken and validated for this sim, and thus the results were completely invalid.
So you are right, people will probably try to derive useful conclusions from simulators in 2105 and there's a good chance they will be wrong. :-)
Just as we can tell that the ancient Egyptians had help from aliens in
building the pyramids, 'cos they "obviously couldn't have done it by
themselves". :-)
Unless someone comes up with a 3000 year old pyramid building simulator that clearly shows they had help from aliens, I still am going to believe that the aliens built the pyramids entirely themselves before returning to Kobol and Caprica to work on their new fancy robot project that just got funding.
Curt.
-- Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text: 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
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