I should qualify my statement. X-plane provides a simple way to get a rough idea of how an aircraft *may* perform. Personally I have made several aircraft in X-plane and it is a straight forward process. Yes, it has its drawbacks, but it must be remembered that it really is just a game (albeit a relatively sophisticated one) and is no replacement for engineering analysis. All that being said, it is fun to think, what would happen if I put another control here - and test it out :)
I think Curt's comments summed it up perfectly. Duncan -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jon S. Berndt Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 12:55 PM To: FlightGear user discussions Subject: Re: [Flightgear-users] Building of entirely new aircraftintoFlightGear > I'll probably be shot for saying this on this list, but if you are building > an entirely new aircraft from scratch you may find X-plane far more useful > in this respect - not open source or free I know - but it does offer the > capability to design and test fly completely new aircraft without > needing to be an aero engineer. > > Duncan That's a bit of regurgitated hype. :-) Seriously, nobody is better at hype than Austin. I say that with all seriousness and some amused "admiration". X-Plane does command some degree of respect, and it is a fine looking flight simulation program, which - from what I hear - does a pretty good job with modeling decent flight dynamics in a normal regime and plausible dynamics in the extremes. I am extremely skeptical that anyone would use X-Plane to "design" new aircraft, or to model flight dynamics for critical engineering or training simulators. Here's a challenge. You write up an X-24B, or XB-70, or X-15 flight model (from scratch) for X-Plane, flight test the resulting flight model from high supersonic speeds down to touchdown, and show me the coefficients and stability derivatives within the flight envelope. I'll compare the results with actual flight test results. I'm not sure how that would turn out, one way or the other, although I have my suspicions. Jon _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
