Hi,
my name Martin Closs an I live in Munich, Germany (yes, the place with all that beer ;-)). I am a aerospace engineer, the "space" part as my job and the "aero" part as a hobby. I fly hang gliders and this is also why I am here: Slightly dissatisfied with the safety aspects of learning how to fly a hang glider (it's all solo; basically you get a slap on your shoulder by your teacher, saying: "You ca do this!"), I decided to develop a simulator. It's original base is FlightGear, which is great due to it's open architecture. The graphics however are - well... let's say not sufficient for simulating aircraft that are flown completely visually. That's where Outerra kicks in: It uses the same flight dynamics model (JSBSim) as I use in FlightGear :-). And the fractal terrain ist exactly what you need to judge height, speed and such while approaching the ground :-)). So I might be using Outerra in a rather unconventional manner: My aircraft model has no rudders, no flaps, no gear, no nothing (hang gliders don't either). The steering commands come from force sensors placed on the simulation setup (basically, a real control bar and real harness bolted to the ceiling). These signals are converted to joystick axes and thus sent to the PC. Furthermore, it's a flying wing. So no tail, which makes it quite hard to establish all the aerodynamic coefficients JSBSim needs. The most impartant ones are lift, drag and pitching moment, which I could take from real measurements.
Once I finished writing everything up, I will place the information on how it works on the web for anyone to build it if he/she wishes (but don't hold you breath, though...).
Cheers,
Martin
