Pilot's Log

This Trailer.

I just want to use my own obsolete flight sim programs, and take them in different directions. Darn.

(I think theidolhands might want to hear about this little "space oddity".)

Today, my buddy Paul gave me an audio CD copy of content he acquired though his Disney contacts...

...Soundtracks from the Moonliner and Mission To Mars attractions at the Disney theme parks.

Listening to them threw me back thirty-one years to the first time I visited Florida and Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was my favorite of the attractions then. The concept was a flight-simulation theater that took the crowd on a semi-realistic journey to the Red Planet, with rudimentary motion seating and panoramic projection screens of the spacecraft's external views. Before entering the theater itself, the crowd would go through a "Mission Control Brief" led by an audio-anamatronic character, who stood in front of banks of NASA-variety high-tech consoles "manned" by other robotic mannekins. The far wall of the room had large screen video and movie projectors. Going through that was, to a twelve-year-old kid, like living the future.

This disk had all fifteen minutes of audio from that attraction, and now my imagination can flit back there and remember it all. Three other tracks were from the earlier Moonliner incarnation of the ride, with public address chatter of a ("transistor-punk"?) aerospace passenger terminal, engine noise from a George Pal-era spaceship, and overture music from when it was 100% acoustic orchestral hardware. No better evidence of how much the world has changed...and also, how much the world's future avoided what we thought we wanted, back in those decades after WW2.

I'll go back to Florida, but I'm not sure I'll go back to Walt Disney World. Mission To Mars was replaced before I finished my flight training around 1990, and space tourism is either alive and well, or about to be swept aside by history, depending on who you ask. In the meantime, I'm the Dork Who Fell To Earth, looking for the next hyperspace portal and saving up for a ticket to Anthea. Hope you'll be on the flight with me. I could always use a travelling companion.

PS: Thanks to www.lunar.org...some visuals of what space tourism looked like to Disney from the outside: ( Read more... )

And from www.davelandweb.com...Mission Control: ( Read more... )

Since the above piece of hardware is very likely NOT in my future, I've been thinking about whether I could home-build a sim cockpit. I'd seen a series of magazine articles many years ago about somebody who duplicated a Cessna dashboard for his computer, but since then, the tech has changed. And changed. And changed.



This is a doctored cockpit layout diagram from the Stavatti Stalma, the under-perpetual-development fighter jet featured in my avatar. There are a dozen different configurations offered for this cockpit; this one is centered around off-the-shelf rather than custom or future hardware. (I got the .pdf brochure as a download a few years ago. It's no longer available but they have another for the Machete strike fighter project HERE.)

Anyway I'm using this material as a springboard for a technical brainstorm. For displays and instrument output I'm thinking cell phone video screens and laptop computer screens. I wonder if these could be had as separate components rather than having to buy consumer goods for the parts. I bet the video screens from cell phones are cheap enough now to make the overall dashboard an affordable possibility.

Of course, I'd still need the big screen someday. How big? I'm flexible.

http://flightsimmachinima.montydan.com/index

A source for flight-sim based movies.

One thing I've noticed: playback of a flight-sim run where the view is on the backside of the plane--the most BORING way to do it.

An idea (and I'm sure others who play flight sims have had it too)...a set of recamming algorhythms which would record a set of "tracks" and then allow, on playback, a quick and easy way to switch between them. Virtual camera planes, preset to track the action in visually interesting ways.

It probably can be done. I would wager that somebody is doing it. I don't know if commercial flight-sims offer it, 'cause I don't have any made after six years ago.

FP

( Long Flight Sim Combat Video Behind Cut )

Funky Italian pop soundtrack!

FP

( ...The same way the demos for 'One Must Fall: Battlegrounds' had... )

...But then I got the game, and could never play it.

FTR: It's Global ACE, a futuristic massive multi-user online air combat game, strongly reminiscent of the Yukikaze anime, the TV version of Area 88, Macross Plus, Battlestar Galactica, Tigers of Terra and the like. [ADDENDA:] It is also known as Air Rivals, Space Cowboy Online and Flysis. ACE Online is the version that includes North America; Air Rivals is the version for Europe and other locations.

If I had seen something like this when I was a kid, I would have both drooled AND cried myself to sleep.

FP

The Guard-Lee company. They make mockup spacecraft. Built the sets for "From The Earth To The Moon", and restore spacecraft for museums.

What I want my next computer to look like:



And if I were using such a system to play on-line flight sim games over some high-speed net access (pipe dream part 2), I'd want a microphone/earphone headset connected to a voice-recog chat device so I could harangue as I buzz.

The pictured machine is a Frasca Mentor system, designed for flight schools. They can also build the dashboard to handle more conventional dial instruments, but those glass-cockpit layouts look nice too. Of course, a dream system would be modular, so you could switch between yoke and joystick/sidestick attitude controls, or move the throttle quadrant from right to left (as on fighter jets)...or maybe even add more exotic controls (like the recticle devices used to point the guns on attack helos).

I've been waiting all my computerized life--heck, longer than that!--for a system like this one.

FP