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On EBay: Shuttle Flight Deck Simulator
An anonymous reader writes: "Just to pass time before taking the real trip.
shuttle flight deck simulator" Not a real nasa simulator, but a very impressive operating replica. The construction details are quite interesting too.
Most of the pictures on the page have a little note under them saying what's being sold doesn't include everything shown. What is included?
If he recieved a grant (I'm assuming some type of educational type), wouldn't this be property of the goverment/school system/public entity?
I'm guessing you (like several people I know) don't understand why people play videogames either.
A lot of people (like myself) would like to do things that we can't - whether it's flying a space shuttle, piloting mecha, or leading a party of adventurers into a dungeon.
Flying an airplane is cool, but it's just not the same thing, any more than getting a job in the timber industry driving a six-legged forest walker would convince me to sell my copy of MechWarrior 2 =).
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I also had switch guards fabricated by a local metalworking shop. On the shuttle, their purpose is to keep the weightless, floating astronauts from accidentally bumping an important switch. In my simulator, they weren't really necessary, but I was going for total realism...
This is overkill, especially if it was taxpayer's money. Perhaps it was a fixed-priced contract and the extra's were on him, I don't know. Otherwise, just use erector-set L-joints or something.
Also, I have seen turn-knobs roughly similar to the grey ones he talks about at Radio Shack. He went and made *custom* turn-knobs.
If such "extra's" were out of his pocket, fine. However, as a tax-payer I would have a fit if I found out all the custom stuff that was made when close-enough ones were available off-the-shelf.
He must be an ex-military contractor.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, looking at his history, he sold a batch of 9 CRT monitors a while ago. I guess he's slowly selling off everything and stuff...
yeah.
ok, my head hurts. 5 minutes till I get to go home.
If all the switches do is light-up that's probably a fairly accurate representation of the space shuttle's cockpit. Afterall, unless you build the ENTIRE SHUTTLE there's not much they can do now is there?
No sig for you.
I helped to install network cabling in the very school this simulator used to reside in a few years back... Although I never saw it running, it appeared to be a well crafted simulator. I've seen the one at space camp as well, and it was surprisingly close. I'm fairly certain most of the buttons and switches were wired to something, with several computers running the simulator. The room it was in had just about enough room to get in and out of the cockpit, the rest covered in equipment. My first reaction was disbelief that a school actually had something this cool. I can't believe the school ditched this... perhaps the local Children's Museum would be interested in it as a sort of local, mini-space camp. Either way, I think it was awesome that someone went to all this trouble to build something like this for his school. Regardless of how he's selling it off on e-bay, this guy is authentic about his description of the way he built it and the way it was used in the past.