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You should try: https://www.x-plane.com/ Simulated flight in VR is BETTER than a $200,000 home cockpit......

For $200,000 you can have a real cockpit in a real plane.

This isn't exactly true. The average person uses "video game" to describe flight simulator software all the time. The FAA permits the use of flight sims for pilot training. That means X-Plane, where you can get the non-FAA certified version, fully tricked out, for under $2,000 -- including the beefed up PC But, you can START for just $60 -- and there isn't much real difference.

In a final rule published on April 11 (2016), the agency increases the aviation training device (ATD) hours pilots can credit toward an instrument rating. The FAA now allows up to 10 hours credit in a basic aviation training device and up to 20 hours in an advanced aviation training device, not to exceed a maximum of 20 total hours under part 61. The previous maximum allowance was 10 hours in an FAA-approved aviation training device.

The FAA Certified version is mostly a USB dongle that enforces frame rate control and a bunch of settings. You can do all that manually on the $60 version.

https://www.x-plane.com/pro/

X-Plane 10, with AIPilotX's HD Mesh v3 and the Massachusetts Pro VFR Scenery will eat up 32 GB of RAM easily.

Flight simulation is one of those areas where I doubt there will ever be such a thing as enough memory. There's always something to model in greater detail.

But he did not really accomplish anything amazing. He most likely read the forums at DCS http://www.digitalcombatsimula... and or xPlane http://www.x-plane.com/desktop...

Doing what many others have done already. The rift has been used in sims since it came out. With extensive instructions on how to simulate every detail of a cockpit from a simple 172 to 777 to an F-18. How to get all of that working on a PC. As a simmer myself. Much of it is simple stuff.

Looking at his build, it is cool. But in no way amazing.

Can be done cheaper then that. Those in the Digital Combat simulator http://www.digitalcombatsimula... and xPlane http://www.x-plane.com/desktop... community have been building stuff like this for years. With extensive instructions on how to use everything from MFD's to rifts to io boards for all the buttons and switches. With all age groups and budgets.

This individual is probably a user on one of those very forums. The blogger who wrote the article just saw something cool. Did no research and blogged about this awesome thing this kid did that no one "to him" has done before

Simers in the DCS http://www.digitalcombatsimula... and xplane http://www.x-plane.com/desktop... community have been using the rift since day 1. With home simpit builds that put this "news worthy pit to shame.

There is an existing simulation for Mars flight in X-Plane. I've flown (simulated) flights on Mars many, many times. Very interesting differences from here on Earth. See:

http://www.x-plane.com/desktop...

http://www.x-plane.com/adventu...

Note I "flew" on Mars in a previous version of X-Plane. I'm not sure if the current version 10 supports flights on Mars. If nothing else, read the second link.

There is an existing simulation for Mars flight in X-Plane. I've flown (simulated) flights on Mars many, many times. Very interesting differences from here on Earth. See:

http://www.x-plane.com/desktop...

http://www.x-plane.com/adventu...

Note I "flew" on Mars in a previous version of X-Plane. I'm not sure if the current version 10 supports flights on Mars. If nothing else, read the second link.

Atmospheric pressure on Mars is 1% that of Earth. How're you going to get any lift?

if you rotate the blades 10x as fast as you do on Earth, you'll get the same lift.

That said, gravity on Mars is 1/3rd as much as Earth, so you only need 1/3rd the lift. So rotating the blades at 6x the rate you'd rotate them on Earth would be sufficient.

Or you could go with much larger blades.

Either way ... it's doable. It would require more power than it would on Earth, but it's certainly doable.

This is a pretty interesting discussion of how we'd fly on Mars, done in the context of the X-Plane simulator. It's written with fixed wing planes in mind rather than helicopters, but most of it still applies.

Thanks for posting this. I was thinking it the whole time.

Here's a direct link to the citation Munroe uses for what aerodynamics on Mars is like: http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html
Warning: lots of All-Caps.

XPlane 10 does not support SLI. There is at least one application for a single-GPU card with better performance than a GeForce 680. When the interstate system in the game uses real data, it's very realistic. No other single application I am aware of needs 75GB for a complete installation.

I'm a little late to the game, but there is a Whitehouse petition I signed after learning about how X-Plane, a really great flight produced by an independent team, is being threatened legally by a patent troll.

Referring to the lawsuit brought by patent troll Uniloc against Laminar research (the developers of X-Plane) for using Google-provided authentication code in their Android app: http://www.x-plane.com/x-world/lawsuit/ Looks like every Android-app developer of significance currently stands at risk of being sued!

FAA certification?

It seems at least one FAA certified product is a set including Flight Gear, so I would not use that to say X Plane is the only serious flight simulator to run on Apple Mac OS X & GNU/Linux.

FAA certification?

It would be nice if Google actually went after this troll; however, this troll obviously knows they're probability of surviving against Google is 0 so they went after these 8 developers. Heck, even Oracle didn't survive against Google.

The trick shot there is these 8 developers convincing a judge that the patent is invalid because of "prior art" if you will (see this link from Laminar Research); or if it's considered valid that the plaintiff should go after Google instead. If the judge agrees the case is over for the plaintiff.

X-Plane has a pro version that is used in FAA certified simulators. Though, interestingly enough, I just found that there have been FAA certified simulators based on FlightGear, too.

Is Flightgear FAA certified? (If it is, cool - I had no idea. But I doubt it.)

Ah, well, if it's a slip-up on their part...

I knew the rest of this, though. Other people happening by the thread might not though, so appreciate the detail.

(read through good part of the FAA airplane handbook and IFR handbook, also played around a bit with VATSIM via X-Plane.)

http://www.x-plane.com/desktop/landing/

Seriously. You don't need anything else if you want a serious flight sim.

iRacing is basically the end-all in car racing.

YMMV.

Buy a computer and go here.

The flight models in X-Plane have been better due to Laminar Research's approach; MSFS has traditionally used look-up tables for aircraft modelling, whereas X-Plane uses finite element analysis. Even with FEA, though, Garbage In Garbage Out applies.

Furthermore, XP is packaged with a variety of tools to create and manage aircraft models. Blender and GIMP can be used to enhance their visual modelling. There's a "free as in beer" world editor. Put it all together and the FS community can put together content for X-Plane.

There's a lot of controversy being generated over at the AVSIM forums right now, due to rumors stating that there will limited opportunity for third parties to create (and distribute, free or otherwise) content for MS Flight. It's my belief that community support is what makes a flight simulator really shine. If MS has killed or maimed that community support for Flight, I'm not sure it'll go anywhere.

The MSFS series has unfortunately never been procedure approved. However, I'm pretty sure that X-plane has a special version which is procedure approved (I don't know what the difference between this and the standard version is though). I don't think flightgear is, but i've not followed them in a while.

There's no more special X-Plane version - you do have to unlock the approved version though by buying a USB license key.

Basically it reconfigures it to FAA requirements for flight training devices. More details

Don't be fooled by "unlock" - traditional X-Plane has a DVD check to get it out of demo mode. The USB key just ensures you don't have to buy a copy of X-Plane AND the USB key for every computer - the USB key will bypass the DVD check.

You mean like X-Plane Pro? It'll cost you $5,000+ in FAA Certified hardware, in addition to the software, to be able to use the simulator to log some actual hours.

Hopefully they'll do both. The other big flight sim program, X-Plane, has both community created free addons and commercial addons at additional cost from third parties. There's a big community around that and it adds a lot to the program. As people might expect, the stuff you pay for is usually better quality, althrough there is some really great free stuff out there.

It'd be nice if Microsoft encourages others to make content and provides tools to help with that. But I'm not sure that's part of their business model for this release.

http://www.x-plane.com/

Does everything this 'simulator' talks about being impressive ... oh, and it did it several years ago.

3D, multiple renderer PCs, carrier landings, air-to-air refueling, formation flying, forest fire water pickups, space shuttle re-entrys (that one is hell btw, do a full reentry and survive)

Its also FAA certified for training, though you do have to pay a small fortune to get the USB key that 'enables certification'

If you're looking for a PC flight sim, X-Plane 10 is due out for Christmas.
It looks great.

You can fly planes or ballons.

Those 400 knot takeoffs and landings will be exciting, and you can forget about balloons in such an atmosphere.
http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html

Could such an aircraft be configured for mapping the surface of Mars?

Try it and see. X-Plane lets you fly on Mars. Yes, there's a Linux version too, and you can find a bunch of electric (and/or rocket) aircraft for Mars on X-Plane.org.

Could such an aircraft be configured for mapping the surface of Mars?

Try it and see. X-Plane lets you fly on Mars. Yes, there's a Linux version too, and you can find a bunch of electric (and/or rocket) aircraft for Mars on X-Plane.org.

I'm actually looking forward to the Android port of X-Plane coming out:
http://x-plane.com/index_mobile.html

But yeah, that's more of a sim than a game, but that's the kind of game I tend to like ;-)

I wasn't that impressed by the DS... my son has one, but is always begging to play Angry Birds or something on my HTC Slide instead.
Never touched a PSP tho, and not many recent consoles for that matter. I tend to prefer doing the "serious" games on my PC.

Google for the difference between indicated air speed and ground speed. Thats the first problem.

The second problem is the X-Plane simulator guys claim that indicated air speed of about 50 miles per hour (referenced to earth sea level equivalent pressure) is about the same as 500 miles per hour actual air speed on Mars.

http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html

"First of all, the atmosphere is ONE PERCENT as thick on Mars as it is on earth... INDICATED airspeed is proportional the the square root of the air density, so the INDICATED airspeed is ONE TENTH the true airspeed."

So your ground speed has approximately nothing to do with your airspeed due to high winds. Then the low air pressure means on Mars it aerodynamically behaves like its about 1/10 earth air speed.

So the wind tunnel at 100 mph earth pressure provides the same feel as a plane flying 1000 mph Mars pressure. Then add some nice head or tail winds...

I'm no expert, but since the atmospheric pressure on Mars is so low propellers/balloons etc probably won't work very well.

Jet engines work pretty well at low pressure with some cooling issues. The killer is you need something that burns in mostly carbon dioxide (liquid fluorine?)

The killer for propellers is its just a rotating airfoil (like a helicopter blade) and the speed of sound drops with density. And classical prop designs are an utter failure when supersonic.

The killer for balloons is a completely different problem, the overall vehicle needs to be less dense than the atmosphere it displaces. Which is just barely possible to do on earth. Not going to work on Mars.

Flying on Mars is non-trivial. See the X-Plane guys

http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html

So maybe there won't be a real one, but maybe MIT could export their design to make an X-Plane model.

X-Plane supports Mars flight simulations, and has for a while...

http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html
http://www.dreamsenses.com/mars/marsx.html

I don't know how much effort is required to use it nowadays, but the install cds come with two mars craft:
http://www.x-plane.com/pg_Meet_X-Plane.html

X-Plane supports Mars flight simulations, and has for a while...

http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html
http://www.dreamsenses.com/mars/marsx.html

I don't know how much effort is required to use it nowadays, but the install cds come with two mars craft:
http://www.x-plane.com/pg_Meet_X-Plane.html

Why on earth would you even look at that? It's so 1990's.
X-Plane is available on OS X and Linux. It's far more extensible and customizable, anyway.

Why on earth would you even look at that? It's so 1990's.
X-Plane is available on OS X and Linux. It's far more extensible and customizable, anyway.

That's fine, there are far superior options available.

To quote: "And nothing of value was lost..."

What's more sweet? Something that pushes the hardware a bit more.

http://www.x-plane.com/iPhone/iPhone.html

I am also interested in knowing how long ESP will be available because my company used it for a solution and invested time and money into getting it approved and purchased. Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform. It sounds like X-Plane is the way to go from now on. This is the last time I gamble a product's success on Microsoft. Every gaming studio Microsoft touches seems to sink like the Bismarck. http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html

The X-Plane site itself is offering deals for the abandoned ESP customers:

http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/esp_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/order.html

I like the comment "X-Plane 9 (temporarily $39.00 to let in all the new MS users)."

I am also interested in knowing how long ESP will be available because my company used it for a solution and invested time and money into getting it approved and purchased. Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform. It sounds like X-Plane is the way to go from now on. This is the last time I gamble a product's success on Microsoft. Every gaming studio Microsoft touches seems to sink like the Bismarck. http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html

The X-Plane site itself is offering deals for the abandoned ESP customers:

http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/esp_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/order.html

I like the comment "X-Plane 9 (temporarily $39.00 to let in all the new MS users)."

I am also interested in knowing how long ESP will be available because my company used it for a solution and invested time and money into getting it approved and purchased. Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform. It sounds like X-Plane is the way to go from now on. This is the last time I gamble a product's success on Microsoft. Every gaming studio Microsoft touches seems to sink like the Bismarck. http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html

The X-Plane site itself is offering deals for the abandoned ESP customers:

http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/esp_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/order.html

I like the comment "X-Plane 9 (temporarily $39.00 to let in all the new MS users)."

I am also interested in knowing how long ESP will be available because my company used it for a solution and invested time and money into getting it approved and purchased. Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform. It sounds like X-Plane is the way to go from now on. This is the last time I gamble a product's success on Microsoft. Every gaming studio Microsoft touches seems to sink like the Bismarck. http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html

The X-Plane site itself is offering deals for the abandoned ESP customers:

http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/esp_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/order.html

I like the comment "X-Plane 9 (temporarily $39.00 to let in all the new MS users)."

Well, duh. Yes, they do. I do. With good reason. And so do many others, e.g.: X-plane's secret

When you have this for the iPhone, it really tells you something...

http://x-plane.com/iPhone/iPhone.html

I dont like microsoft, bu flight simulator is a really good similar and nothing else will beat it for quite a while even if it isnt being maintained.

Actually, though I don't do more than tinker with them every so often, most of the other pilots I've spoken to seem to favor X-Plane as being a far more realistic simulator than MS Flight Sim. Not as polished, but it depends on whether you're going for something that's closer to a game or closer to a tool.

http://www.x-plane.com/

try x-plane: http://www.x-plane.com/

runs on linux, mac, and windows, and is a helluvalot better FS than MSFS is...

Sorry - but you have no clue. Mars' atmosphere at the surface has about 1% of the Earth's density, making something like aerodynamic flying impossible.

O'RLY? http://www.x-plane.com/mars.html

Android certainly has potential, but so far I see a number of things that prevent it from being an iPhone killer.

First off, it's entirely Java based. This is just plain silly. Why not have the APIs with bindings for Java? Google has completely cut off other languages. Furthermore, while speed normally isn't an issue with Java these days, there is overhead. Could one really build the X-Plane[1] simulator in Java like they did for the iPod? It's pretty CPU and i/o intensive (calculating force vectors and loading textures, building 3-d models etc, at 30 frames a second). While the iPhone's SDK is mainly objective-C (which I think is pretty silly too), there are a number of languages that you can use to develop with including Python, using an objC bridge. Currently this is not the case with Android. It's only Java. Part of what made the iPhone and Touch so cool early on was that they were little unix systems and one could install python or ruby or any other language and hack together neat scripts and things. Of course Apple has kind of put an end to much of that though, with their official SDK. While Python and probably Ruby can be used, the guts of the iPhone are once again off-limits. It may as well not even be a unix system anymore for all the good it does developers and users. Very sad. Android is open and happens to be able to run on a Linux core, but with core APIs all in Java, there's currently no way to interface from a shell script or to build ad-hoc applications. JPython isn't the solution either since Android's jvm is completely incompatible with Sun's and JPython emits bytecode directly.

Secondly, I have yet to see that Android really does support multi-touch operations. Demos I've seen so far look fairly conventional, using buttons to zoom, and so forth. I've also seen a fair number of pop-up menus in use in Android apps, which just don't work as well as the way that most iPhone apps typically do it. Perhaps this is mainly do to the poor way in which the UIs have been constructed in the Android apps that I've seen video demos of.

[1] http://www.x-plane.com/iPhone.html