I am sure I have a photo taken from inside a 737 sim with the visual running somewhere. I will try and dig out and scan if people are interested. I also have some good pics of a 737 and 747 I was on the site team to install.

I believe aircraft are far easier to simulate at high quality than cars because the lift, drag, thrust interactions of aircraft are well understood.

With a car you have 4 small points of contact that define how the car interacts with the world and they are not as well understood. They are also far more subtle as you have differences in surface, loose gravel, dust and much to simulate and layered on top are all the heat, wear, cool cycles etc.

In contrast an aircraft just interacts with air (apart from take off and landing) and on the whole that is easier to simulate, even effects like microbursts and windsheer and the like.

I did manage to loop a 747 Took it to 35000 feet then pointed striaght down. At 10000 feet started to pull back (Needed feet on the cockpit to pull back) and over she went. Would prob rip the wings off IRL but we didnt need to simulate wing fall off stress even for Level D

Quote from Jakg :

A cessna is not a Eurofighter though...

And a family hatchback is not an F1 car, which is the kind of thing the original post was going on about


When I used to be in Air Cadets, I spent a day on the full motion E-3D Sentry simulator at RAF Waddington, which was amazing fun. At one point we did a landing with the runway covered in ice, and ended up with the aircraft sliding down the runway with the nose pointing at 90 degrees to the direction of motion

where is the "improvement suggestion" in this thread? ^^

Quote from GeForz :

where is the "improvement suggestion" in this thread? ^^

Clearly in the first post.

Something similar to what I was thinking is simply to add a motorway ring road as a map on the game which could act as a cruise server.

Quote from Jakg :

A cessna is not a Eurofighter though...

Compare like with like.

Driving a Proton (or similar hatchback) may be easy, but an F1 car, probably not so much.

Flying a Cessna (or similar aircraft) may be easy, but a Eurofighter, probably not so much.

Quote from spiderbait90 :

Flying a Cessna (or similar aircraft) may be easy, but a Eurofighter, probably not so much.

Partially untrue. It is true that eurofighter is unstable airplane where Cessna is stable. However, due to the fact that it is completely fly-by-wire with all kind of jimbo-jambos (YD, RS, SAS, etc) it is more like flying a flight simulator than flying an airplane.

Oops, that was little bit too off-topic... Please continue! ( </offtopic> )

So what you are saying, is that the Eurofighter is the 'Proton Wira of the Skies'.

I'd rather it wasn't.

Quote from spiderbait90 :

So what you are saying, is that the Eurofighter is the 'Proton Wira of the Skies'.

I'd rather it wasn't.

Never seen Proton Wira, so I don't know.

However, all modern military and commercial airplanes have fly-by-wire. That means that pilot don't control ailerons etc directly via cable wires. It is just like flying a flight simulator: You just tell the computer to do the maneuvers (To be honest, it isn't that simple... Pilot controls SAS (Stability augmentation system) that controls the airplane. SAS does diagnose and re-corrects the input. Of course aircrafts also has AFCS (Automatic flight control system), which is part of FCS with SAS. And lets not forget FMS and... Well, you got the idea...)

Quote from spiderbait90 :

Compare like with like.

Driving a Proton (or similar hatchback) may be easy, but an F1 car, probably not so much.

Flying a Cessna (or similar aircraft) may be easy, but a Eurofighter, probably not so much.

Eurofighter is like an arcade game. It is not stable in the air and actually inpossible to fly without the mass of electronics and computers between the controls and the flight surfaces. These take all the inputs and decides what it thinks the pilot has asked for and does it.

Makes it harder to stuff up tbh. But then you want all that so you have more time to worry about situational awareness instead of flying when in combat!

Quote from Gekkibi :

oops, you got in before me

Airbus planes for example have 3 computers sourced from 3 different companies (All who worked off the same spec). The 3 computers look at every input and decide via majority vote about what they allow etc.

*facepalm*

Is it too hard to stay on topic or what?

it would be damn boring to keep 50kph...with gtr cars you even dont have to shift to second gear...it would be just boring, lfs havent reached the "sense of speed" yet, so you have to go at leat 150kph to feel youre driving fast...in a real car its just maybe 80kph, you can hear the wind, car noise, everything moving much faster than on screen...
roads are too flat without details

Quote from spiderbait90 :

Compare like with like.

Driving a Proton (or similar hatchback) may be easy, but an F1 car, probably not so much.

Flying a Cessna (or similar aircraft) may be easy, but a Eurofighter, probably not so much.

Now that you say it, it reminds me of trying to play Falcon 4.0 and failing miserably hard. ( It is a super simulator of the F/A-18 ). But i can do fine in IL-2 Sturmovik 1946.

Quote from palandri :

Now that you say it, it reminds me of trying to play Falcon 4.0 and failing miserably hard. ( It is a super simulator of the F/A-18 ). But i can do fine in IL-2 Sturmovik 1946.

F-16 is the Falcon (single-engine, single rudder, very tiny, generally more popular with the US Air Force). F/A-18 is the Hornet (twin-engine, twin rudder, slightly larger, generally more popular with the US Navy).

Oops, my mistake then, its a F-16 simulator.

Quote from Woz :

Eurofighter is like an arcade game. It is not stable in the air and actually inpossible to fly without the mass of electronics and computers between the controls and the flight surfaces. These take all the inputs and decides what it thinks the pilot has asked for and does it.

Makes it harder to stuff up tbh. But then you want all that so you have more time to worry about situational awareness instead of flying when in combat!

The reason the eurofighter is Fly-By-Wire and so unstable isn't to make it easier to fly, letting the pilot get on with fighting (although that's partially the reason). The main reason is to make it unbelievably agile.

The eurofighter and a few other modern agile fighters are deliberately made so unstable that their natural reaction is to instantly swap ends and spin out of control. Think the Raceabout with a masively oversteery setup with maximum outwards toe on the rear wheels. The result is that it it's impossible for a human to fly them unaided. Not just hard, but impossible.

The computer however, can react fast enough with tiny trimming of the control surfaces to keep it flying in a straight line (again, using the RAC in the above example, it's like the AI making tiny adjustments to the counter-steer to keep it in control). The massive advantage is that you are able to change direction *insanely* fast by harnessing this tendency to swap ends, and having the flight computers cancel the effect just when you want it.

Quote from Weasley123 :

*facepalm*

Is it too hard to stay on topic or what?

Yep...

A home computer is not a tool sufficiently conducive to learning complex reactions to the chaotic environment that is the public road system.

But it does serve well to teach someone the basics of the car they'll be driving. Like those girls who, somehow, "don't get" how to steer one pair of the four wheels to parallel park a car.