Thank You!!!! 2015 year in review

I was looking over the stats on my page, and I just wanted to put a note of thanks out here for everyone who has come here.  I hope you have found some interesting articles that have helped you and I welcome any suggestions for articles if there is information you would like to see on here as well.

Last year was a very successful year for my page.  I would like to thank the staff at Technical Illusions for contacting me.  They wanted me to produce a Flight Sim to show their product at the San Francisco Electronics Trade Show next month.  Due to health reasons and a whole slew of untimely things, I was not able to help them, but am ecstatic that they contacted me.  It was a great honor and I hope to be able to work with them in the future.  Jeri Ellsworth is one of THE most intelligent women on the planet and it was a great privilege for me to have that consideration.

That being said….You, my readers, are the ones I would like to thank as well.  Every time I see someone has looked at the site, it gives me more and more drive to do more.  It has been slow lately and I apologize for that.  But as I said, there have been a ton of issues come up.  I am hoping to have the Arma Helo Sim finished soon.  I also have a interview that was done with Art Nalls, the only civilian to own a Harrier Jump Jet, that will be part of a up and coming YouTube series that I am excited about.  It was done awhile back, but I was not happy with the end result of my video and wanted a more professional result.  So I have been saving money for some better equipment.  But I also want to thank Mr. Nalls for the opportunity to do the interview.  He is a very nice man that gave me alot of his time and I want to make sure he knows how much that was appreciated.

Well, 2016 is here!!! There will be more to come!  Make sure you check out my archives too, because there is some great stuff in there that I think will be very informative for you.  I want to dream big in 2016.  My goal is to start a flight simulation company in my area. Not just for myself, but as my website is becoming more for my readers, I want my company to be for the employees and customers.  I want to bring a new industry to our area.  I want this to be so big, that everyone benefits from it.  Community is something that seems to be lost in our society.  All everyone thinks about is themselves and making money.  Recently, I was listening to the 1964 Reagan speech for the Barry Goldwater campaign.  He talked about how Mr. Goldwater flew veterans to Arizona for 3 day straight in his own plane, because they couldn’t get a plane home for Christmas; how he payed for someone’s medical bills, that was a employee of his who was very very ill.  The list seemed to go on and on.  I was fortunate enough to grow up in a community that still cared about people like that.  Something this country is missing.  I remember hearing the stories about how Mr. J.C. Penny tithed 90% of his money to his Christian Church and he never did without, because he had faith that the Lord would provide and He did.  Character is a very big part of community.  If the people have no character, then how can it work?  We need to get back to having virtues in this country and respect for our fellow man.  We need to get on our knees before God and ask his forgiveness for each of our own individual sins as well as our sins as a country in whole.  Community is something I can say I have and am thankful for where I live, and also in my church.

Thank you again and may God bless you also in 2016.

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Free at last

Click here to go to X-SIM

X-Sim, what is it?  Something that will change the way games are played at home.  X-Sim is software that controls motors or hydrolic pistions that make a platform move. You have probably heard it called a 3dof platform or 6dof platform.  Dof stands for degrees of freedom.  A 3dof platform would allow movement in the X, Y and Z planes.  Where a 2dof would just be X and Y.  Most racing sims use 2dof. While flight sims use 3dof as a base.  You just have to determine how much time you want to spend on it.  I haven’t had any time to test out the software, but I’ve read a bunch of articles on the website and if you want something for a good price, free is pretty good. This is new territory for me, but the prospects are good. There was a few articles about using wiper motors from cars to control the platform. And I found a few YouTube videos of people who had done it and the results are excellent. So be sure to stay tuned for my first platform. It should be a while because I want to finish one project before I start another. But this is more for you who are out there and maybe have gotten a little farther than I have. Leave some comments or send in your pictures and we will post them on our site to let others see what you have done.  Hope this helps some  of you guys out there. And by the way, this software is for home use, not commercial. So I like it even better because they are looking out for the little guy.

Falcon BMS 4.33

Well it’s been awhile since I talked about software.  I will have a few new posts on some exciting software I have found.  But today I want to talk about the much anticipated Falcon BMS 4.33 release!  I am excited, let me tell you.  For those of you who don’t know about Falcon: Falcon was a simulation platform that started with 2 versions for DOS and then 3 other versions for Windows.  The game that is still played today was developed 20+ years ago.  This is one reason I still play it.  The company dissolved and if I remember right, the software developers had the copyrights to the game, but Spectrum Holobyte wouldn’t let them have it.  Rumor has it that they stole the code back from Spectrum Holobyte.  I like it already just by knowing that, but anyway.  The developers continued to update and write code for the game and release patches called super pack’s.  With the addition of these updates, people started building simpits for the game.  They added a cockpit display extraction tool.  There was a Ramp Start Trainer, and a new loadout program.  Soon after they formed a company called Benchmark Simulations which is the ones who does the updates today.

Now for a little about the game.  I am an original owner of Falcon 4.0.  It was ahead of it’s time.  The game was developed under the advisement of real F-16 pilots.  I was told by one that if I learned everything in that manual, I could fly an F-16.  The manual was over 4 inches thick.

It had a unique platform that ran a simulation in the background of the game for enemy troop movement.  A virtual war game that the computer adjusted as you destroyed targets, or didn’t destroy them.  So if you didn’t blow up a bridge, the enemy could use that bridge and move troops across it.  It was independent of the simulator and was based on your performance on missions.  Totally unheard of in it’s day.  There was AAA, SAM’s, enemy aircraft, air to air refueling, and you could even communicate with the tower and your virtual wingman.

All that said, it was an experience, not a game.  You were at the forefront of computer simulation.  I would say it may have been better, at the time, than what the Air Force had to simulate in.  So what have they done now?  Glad you asked.  For the first time there is carrier ops.  You can fly F16’s, F18’s, The Harrier Jump Jet, Mig 29’s, and the Viggen.  A new terrain system that puts trees on the map and enhances several other aspects of the terrain.  It is now a 64 bit game! There is FLIR, and terrain following radar, the list goes on and on.  Basically it’s now equal to DCS.  You won’t find a better piece of simulation software out there.  It is the greatest flight simulator ever written as far as I am concerned.  To play the game presently, you must own an original Falcon 4.0 CD.  You can get them on ebay for various prices.  Once you have the cd, just  go to the the Benchmark Simulation website and download the update. You won’t be sorry.

Killer Bee -ARES- Burt Rutan

In 1981, the Army asked Burt Rutan to design an aircraft that could support ground troops, and most importantly could be carried behind a small personnel carrier or tank.  What he came up with was a one of a kind jet only he could design.  The ARES main feature is the engine design.

As you can see in this picture, the engine is mounted to the left of the cockpit. This reduces bird strikes and also because of the long exhaust port it reduces the IR signature of the airplane by allowing the inflow and core flow to mix.  The engine is a standard Pratt & Whitney business jet engine. There’s several already in use in the military in trainer aircraft so it is readily available. Some other features of the aircraft include the canards at the front that allowed the aircraft to have high maneuverability. The Gatling gun was also ingeniously mounted to one side and then a concave cut was made in the side of the fuselage to counteract the effect of the Gatling gun throwing the plane off center when it fires. All in all you get a plane designed by a man who is a complete genius. Every minut thing was accounted for and I’m sure it is a joy to fly. But unfortunately the military has never adopted this plane. I would hope, possibly in the future it could be adapted as a drone as the military seeks to expand that program. Check out YouTube for a video of this airplane made by Mr Rutan. As you will see it is probably one of the most capable aircraft ever made.

Worlds 1st (civilian) Arma 3 Helicopter SimPit-Update

Well I’m on my way to the first Arma 3 based simulator.  I wanted to use this platform because the military uses a program based on the software’s engine (virtural battlespace 3).  It is a very unique engine with still alot of untapped potentional.  So here it is.  XSHI guages working.  And I would like to reach out to the Arma community to ask if someone could update the @mfd mod for the guages.  I would like to get all the gauges from the cockpit working.  Work was suspended on this mod a year ago for unknown reasons and it is such a leap over all other “games” out there.  For me this is what seperates this from a game to a simulation.  So if you would like to help, contact me through the about page.

Here is a full map using the Athena mod.  The red blotches on the map are points that the server I was on highlighted for enemy activity or objectives.  The town names, other vehicles and infantry all imported from the server and updated my map!  Very cool.

Notice the blue line.  You can draw on the map, make a flight plan, there is an unlimited amout of things you can do with this

Some other highlights, since Arma uses only 1 processor, I have 5 others probably not being used very much.  I’m looking into hooking up 6 monitors to my CPU using this:

Supposedly you can use this to hook up a 16x pcie card to a 1x slot.  I’m sure it will probably work, but I have always used multiple CPU’s because of the software.  Since Arma uses resources differently this may work, but I’m not holding my breath or anything, because that is alot of resolution for 1 pc.  So we’ll see soon.  I’m also begining on a physical radio for the center console.  Stay tuned.

 

P. S.  I wanna thank the 75th RRC for their support and use of their server.  You should check them out.  They are a unique milsim group and have a nice server to play on.  They also are one of the only running the Mission Enhanced Little Bird mod (MELB) on their public server.  The same one I am using for this sim.  Here is there website:
75rrc.us

It’s time for an upgrade.

Well what do you do when you break your throttle?  Well, you can roll up into a ball and cry.  You can shell out a $100 or more for another.  Or you can grab opportunity by the neck and do what you’ve always wanted to do, build a new one!!!  Yes folks I have built a helicopter throttle out of my Saitek X45 throttle.  For about $25 you can experiment with your joystick and see what you can do with it.  I would recommend going to Micro Center and buying a cheep ps2 type controller and trying to mod it or just build one from scratch after doing this.   There were so many wires because they seperated each component and soldered a small bread board to each section.   So everything was linked together basically.  It was time consuming, but worth it in the end.  No risk no reward.  I still have to build a set of pedals for the rudder control.  There was a slide potentiometer on the bottom of the throttle, originally, hooked up to a little paddle.  I got to thinking about when I did car stereo’s and I would use a big cable with about 12 wires in it to run to the back of the car to hook up to the amplifier.  I said to myself, why don’t you just use cat5 cable?  Well I did 2 6ft runs to the board and tested it and it worked just fine.  I initially was worried about latency, but it didn’t show up when I tested it.  Here is a pict of the first test.

As you can see it was a big jumble of wires.  Now the buttons were attached to the other side of the rudder control so I had to do 2 more runs of cat5 cable back up to where I would put the buttons on the throttle.  So lets shift gears for a minute and talk about cost.  I used stuff I had laying around mostly.  Some guy gave me a bag of old cables, that’s where the cat 5 came from.  I also had most of the tools.  Here is a pict of all the tools I used.

So cost was minimal for me.  I say for me because I hate when people say you can do this for XX dollars and they had half the crap there and it would really cost you 2 times that much.  So I won’t say it would be cheep for you.  But really I could have got by with a solider gun, hot glue gun, soldier, tape,  wire and pvc pipe.  It don’t have to be pretty, it just has to work.  You can make the pvc bend by cutting it and heating it.  Then you can form it.  I had to make the base connector by doing that because the 3/4 inch pipe was about a 1/8 inch too big to attach it securely. 1 5ft stick of pvc could do it all.  My total cost was about $22 actually.

This is kind of an informal post so i’ve been babbling but I do want to talk about one of the highlights.  The Dymo Letratag was a nice addition for this proj.  If your going to build a big sim pit and you want a way to label the switches and make it look good for cheep, then this is the way to go.  Here is a pict of the switch box up close.  Not all the labels are on there yet.

When you figure how much it would cost to CNC machine the labels onto the plates this is a good alternative.  Also it is a thermal printer so there is no ink and the labels are plastic so they are pretty resilient to wear and tear too. 
Well there’s more to come.  Stay tuned.

Harrier Jump Jet

The Harrier Jump Jet is the first production Aircraft to fully integrate V/STOL (vertical/short takeoff and landing). The Harrier was made by a company called Hawker, who is famous for the Sea Hawk, and the Hawker Hunter among other aircraft. British Aerospace and McDonnell Douglas developed the AV-8B Harrier II, which was last produced in 1997 and the last remaining remanufactured aircraft rolled off the floor in 2003. All in all there were over 850 Harriers made as well as Variant prototypes for different purposes of testing.
The Harrier has only 1 pilot in most configurations, unless it is a trainer. It is 46 ft long and 25 ft wide. Depending on the version it ranges from 545 MPH to 735 MPH. Max take-off weight is around 26,000 LB generally and it has a combat radius of 300 NMI. As far as armament is concerned, there is nothing it can’t shoot. From cluster bombs to napalm, even Nukes are no problem. This is one of the most versatile aircraft ever made!  No wonder why it was a top choice for the Marines.

Be sure to check back soon, I am doing my first interview soon with a new You Tube series I am creating!!!!!

There’s nothing like the real thing baby!

How would you like to get out of the sim pit and into a real cockpit?!!  How would you like to experience 4G turns at 10,000 ft?!!  How would you like to learn real combat tactics from a F18 pilot?!! Sounds too good to be true?  Well it’s not.  Air Combat USA in Fulerton, CA is offering the ride of a life time for about $1300.00.  You can learn from a real military aviator while you are in the sky flying a military trainer plane.  Then after you get your lessons, you get to put them into use in a real dogfight with another real plane.  It’s too good to be true!  Finally all of us air nuts have a chance to experience the real thing.  This is what we have been waiting for boys.  Go get some.  Oorahh

Home

Was you born in a Barnes

The Barnes Akers Simpit.
A few years back a couple of gentlemen, by the name of Peter Akers and Michael Barnes, wanted to produce a simple but effective simpit.  There design was for the average guy who didn’t have a lot of tools, time or money.  Since I don’t have any of those things, I’m sold!  Their pit can be assembled and disassembled in a matter of minutes and is adaptable to different heights of people.  Little did they know that their design would become the standard to which 90% of the pits built would come from.  So if you don’t have a clue how to start, then don’t worry,  the planning process has already been done!  I’ll tell you what, I’ll even provide a link.  Click here! 

As I have said in the past, you have to have some knowledge about how to use power tools.  If you don’t know how to use power tools, then do not attempt this project.