This is the first sensor in the project before anything else started working interms of instrumentation.The simulator learned to see and learned to broadcast in the same version. (GitHub: controller, data bridge — versions explained in Eight Copies.) A Camera on a Neck Physically, the pod is the simplest sensor in the project: a Unity … Read more

The radar is the system people ask about first. When you tell someone you built a combat flight simulator, they picture the radar screen: the sweep, the contacts, the lock tone. It is the most iconic instrument in a fighter cockpit. So it usually surprises people when I tell them the radar was one of … Read more

Getting the aircraft to fly was not really the hardest part. It had its own challenges, of course, but I got that working. What I worried about much more was the control system: building the hardware from scratch, writing software for it, and then integrating that hardware into the wider sim so it actually felt … Read more

At this point, I had a rough idea of what I was doing. I would not say I had everything figured out, but I knew what I wanted to build, and more importantly, I had started breaking it into parts. That was important, because there was no way this project was going to work if … Read more

So now the project was actually moving. I was the developer, programmer, game designer, hardware designer, systems integrator — basically everything. Another important detail is that this fund was not originally mine. It had already been awarded to two other people, and I was paired with them to help develop an idea. For me, that … Read more

Inspiration Honestly, I never really set out with the idea of building a flight simulator. What I did have, though, was a growing fascination with fighter jets and military aircraft. A lot of that started with planes like the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 Nighthawk. I remember thinking there was something special about those aircraft. … Read more