@XxMegamonsterxX Second time someone says that, but funny thing, I had to google what that meant, lmao. I'm an uncultured man, never read that book or any of the movies. I was trying to figure out how to make a Southern Cross (best constellation btw) reference without being too obvious. Guess I failed miserably lmao
@Mustang51 Is it? I figured someone must have already tried it lel, it was the first thing that came to mind when I was trying to figure out how to make a bomblet dispenser without needing 400 bomb parts lel.
There are some quirks to figure out, sometimes the explosions will send unexploded shells flying towards you, particularly in slow motion, and cause significant emotional events. Still, I found it pretty fun to mess around with and decided to share it, glad you liked it!
The fuselage parts on those stabilizers must have required ridiculous amounts of patience. It certainly paid off, because it looks beautifully smooth. Very well done.
@Mitchellwi Yeah, it wasn't my intention to submit it into the challenge (as said in the first line of the description). This is based on the plane I submitted back then, and I forgot to erase the URL from the .xml file.
An unguided rocket with a scaled bomb that doesn't go haywire on launch? Man, I needed this in my life! My attempts to do something like this previously have all resulted in the rocket going absolutely bonkers as soon as it's fired.
@Alta2809 Well, with over a thousand downloads I don't know if I'd call it underrated, lol. Perhaps some people are just tired of reading/scrolling through the long descriptions to upvote the thing, but they're an integral part of my creative process so they're not going anywhere anytime soon.
And thanks a lot, man! To be fair, I don't think I'm ever going to make something as complicated as that gunsight, lol. I do have some ideas in mind though, but I'm cooling down for a bit.
@DickBrazen Thank you for the comment! I'm glad this was of use to you. About the altimeter, one of the big issues I had here was how I was having to work with small parts, which can get really annoying at times. I really wouldn't want to go with pieces much smaller than the ones I used here. Also, altimeters IRL usually work in this way; some only have two hands, for 1000 and 100 feet, but others like this one have three hands for 100, 1000 and 10000 feet, an as far as my research found, usually with a similar hand size arrangement. I did take artistic liberties in making the 10k ft hand red, however, for quicker reading.
This has got to be the best challenge I've participated in so far, and certainly the one with the highest quantity of amazing builds! I had a great deal of fun with this one, and the winners are indeed well deserved. That Martin Mauler caught my eye as soon as I saw it, man, those dive brakes.
@Zanedavid Thanks! Yeah, I should probably have set them a bit further apart, but look on the bright side - they're in front of the cockpit, so if the propellers suffer some catastrophic failure they're not flying at you. If you want something really stress-inducing, look at the IA 58 Pucará... That thing has the propellers almost grazing the canopy and in-line with the pilot. It was actually used as an example of "do not do this" in a conceptual aircraft design book I read a long time ago.
Absolutely stunning level of detail right here. You captured the smoothness of the aircraft's lines pretty well, really gives it that trademark Messerschmitt feeling.
@Giantwhale I've been thinking about that since the update came out but I have a long list of other things I want to do first.
@ChisP Some of my other builds might have a thing or two to say about that, lol.
@emanuelga Yes, even here in South America, there was a surprising number of concepts and sometimes even prototypes that never were to be. Argentina is the SA champion in the "cool airplane designs that never went into service" department, but I was surprised to find a book the other day with a bunch of abandoned Embraer projects and concepts, most of them for transport and cargo aircraft but some for attack jets that kind of looked like a small Su-25 and even light fighters.
@TheFantasticTyphoon You read through it? You have bravery in you! lol, yeah,these backstories write themselves in my head as I design the aircraft, and I've got to write it somewhere right? Glad you enjoyed it!
@teodor99 Thanks! "Funky Trees" is the name the devs gave to the new system implemented in 1.9 that essentially lets you write more advanced control inputs for parts like control surfaces, rotators, pistons, etc. In this case I used very basic ones for the instruments, and a far more headache-inducing one for the gunsight. Seeing for yourself is probably going to be better than me trying to explain.
@SodiumChloride Man, you were fast! Last night I was posting the prototype variant as an unlisted aircraft, and accidentaly uploaded it as public. I deleted it as soon as I realized my mistake, but you upvoted it as soon as it went up so I thought you'd be interested - here it is! Sorry for the confusion.
@SnoWFLakE0s Absolutely no problem, the advice you did manage to give proved to be crucial.
As for the suggestion, that would indeed help in making it stand out, but as this is supposed to "emulate" a WWII-era collimator sight, realistically it'd all be the same color. I could indeed make it a very slight change, but for this next plane I'm already stranded on the color palette, lol. In any case, thanks a lot!
@Mustang51 Just to clear a doubt up, we've got until January 7 starts or until it ends? I ask because I'm making a third build and now that I fixed some of its problems I need to touch it up and write a description, lol. Not that it'd be a problem if I can't get it finished in time, two submissions is already a lot and frankly more than I was expecting to do.
@SnoWFlakE0s I think I've figured out issue no. 1: my "Time" calculations appear to be messed up, lol. I'll re-do them, use your clamp advice and see if it works.
this one for sure. The fact it uses the smoke trails mod might have been a factor but it can be flown without the mod parts with no issue. It's also no fun if you haven't read at least a bit of the description and pulled a few Kulbits with it.
The Libélula was another one that surprised me a bit because it's just a huge joy to fly around. I can see why though honestly, it's pretty simple and has its issues, such as the scale being off.
I cannot really complain about anything though, because on the other hand, the large flying wing I posted just after the Garrucha, for instance, garnered a lot, but a lot more attention than I could ever have expected. I made that one when I was bored and frankly have no idea why it did so well.
@SnoWFLakE0s My apologies for the late response, I was in fact not expecting such a quick reply, thank you for devoting a bit of your time and attention for this. I have in fact already drawn a diagram, it was the first thing I did while trying to piece this thing together lel. It's absolutely vital to sketch things prior to throwing yourself at them at least in my experience, I need that visual feedback. I'll be trying to take some good pictures of the sketches in the meantime. How would you prefer I send them to you? I don't think one can make an unlisted forum post, well in any case I could upload the system itself and its testbed plane with the pictures attached to the description.
Continuning, didn't realize the comment would be cut halfway through, my bad.
...which is expected.
So I'd like to ask if you would like to help me with this, or in case that isn't possible, perhaps a few pointers, as I am rather lost; in that case I'd make a post or something to send you the calculations I've done and the inputs I've tried to make - who knows, maybe one of my premises is wrong, I made a mistake somewhere along the calculations themselves or I have done them in a less than code-friendly way. I'm almost sure it's a mistake somewhere in the input statement itself, though. I basically wrote an equation and tried to "translate" it to the Funky Trees syntax; I have very little experience or knowledge in this area, I've done a little bit of Matlab for college about a year ago, but only basic stuff so far (they threw us in without even an introduction to coding) and given the amount of times I've sent things into infinite loops, I wouldn't exactly trust my skills there, lel.
Again, my sincere apologies for the trouble and for extending myself for so long. I had to ask because it's been boggling my mind quite a bit.
@SnoWFLakE0s First of all, I apologize for the extent of this post, but I'd like to ask for help with something, if it isn't too much trouble of course; it's a small thing, and not really necessary for the build I'm doing right now, I could do without it, it'd just be a nifty thing to have.
I've been trying to make a dive-bombing gunsight display, and while doing the calculations on paper is not a big problem, turning it into something that works in SimplePlanes has been an extremely confusing... experience so far. The basis of the equations isn't too different from what you did with your bombsight, it's still a bomb trajectory problem after all, but the system is different in that instead of a rotator turning at a given angle, it's a piston that pushes a "reticle" downwards in such a way that from the operator's view, when the bomb impact point crosses the target, the reticle will be seen on top of the target as well. This of course needs some extra angles to be calculated (as well as the distance from the cockpit to the "reticle" being known and input), but nothing too complicated, and then a tangent will finally give you the "x" distance the reticle needs to depress, with meters as the unit. Since piston travel distance "1" = 1 meter in my testing, this should be doable - at least in theory.
In practice, the piston always pushes the reticle up instead of down, no matter how many times I have selected "invert = true" or attempted to invert the input statement itself with minuses. This is the least of my problems though, as the piston seems to quickly try going to absurd values, even to the point of exceeding the piston travel distance of 1 meter by far, sometimes so violently it sends the plane into a spin on the pitch axis! It would be frankly hilarious to watch if it weren't frustrating.
I also intended to make it so the reticle would never go up, instead its maximum input would be 0 so it would always either rest at its central location or depress as the aircraft went into a dive - with its maximum depression (min input) also set so the reticle would never go below the sight's "collimator", in this case a very thin hollow fuselage, lol. Of course, the sight as of present doesn't even go down to begin with, so I have no way to properly test this but I'd like to know if it can be done. It doesn't seem to behave quite in the same manner as "normal" inputs would, though I've noted if I set both min and max to 0 it doesn't move at all, which is ex
There are simply not enough words for this build, it's amazing. The level of detail is mindblowing, and a functional Garmin suite in SP? You guys are actually insane, lol. I wish I could upvote this twice, one for your work and effort, and another for your pains and suffering.
Congrats on majoring in aerospace, by the way! It's a difficult road to take, as someone who chose to start treading it as well; but so far, it's been a very interesting one. Ever since the plane bug bit me, I couldn't see myself anywhere else.
You'll have challenges ahead of you, as I'm sure you have noticed already lel, but challenges someone with your level of determination and effort will surely overcome. Because holy expletive, man... 1600 parts... Imagine adjusting all that. I shudder at the mere thought.
@SnoWFLakE0s Oh, you mean a manual FCS, like those targeting tables used in WWI/WWII combat vessels? My brain kinda forgot these also count as FCS for a while, lol. Yeah, this could work, and a numerical display would indeed make its use a lot easier.
@SnoWFLakE0s Perhaps you could post it as an unlisted build (instead of public), and provide a link to it in your original post? It's what I do when I've got multiple variants of the same plane without much changing between them.
And you make me curious; do you something in mind for an FCS system? I'd think (in my infinite lack of creativity) it would be impossible to make one right now given you can't input any target data. If in the future we do get target data as inputs - range, bearing, and if they really want to go all out, relative velocity - then that would open up a lot of possibilities. FCS, automated gun turrets, RWR displays.
Man, if you found a way to integrate this into your gunnery system (for ranging information and the like), that would be fantastic. Not that it isn't any less amazing as is.
Keep up the brilliant work, I must say all of this has inspired me to start trying my hand at making something like a Stuvi gunsight. You show people it's possible to do amazing things in SP, and I'm sure many others are also motivated by your endeavours.
Do I see two RWRs, one American and one Russian-like model? I hope they're just for the looks because if you actually made working RWR I will live in great fear of your truly immense power, as I don't think that's even possible right now and as such, would probably be wizardry.
This is amazing. Completely beyond words. The level of detail is mindblowing, and a Garmin suite? You guys are insane, lol. I wish I could upvote twice, one for your work and one for your pains.
Congrats on majoring in aerospace, by the way! It's a difficult road to walk as someone who decided to start treading it as well, but so far it's been a very interesting one.
@Roswell Glad you liked it! It's what I was aiming for, something that's fun to fly and turn around at low altitude.
@MontyPython You'll be lucky if fire is the only thing you get lmao
@TheFantasticTyphoon omg, you have too much power
+1Someone stop this man
@XxMegamonsterxX Second time someone says that, but funny thing, I had to google what that meant, lmao. I'm an uncultured man, never read that book or any of the movies. I was trying to figure out how to make a Southern Cross (best constellation btw) reference without being too obvious. Guess I failed miserably lmao
@Mustang51 Is it? I figured someone must have already tried it lel, it was the first thing that came to mind when I was trying to figure out how to make a bomblet dispenser without needing 400 bomb parts lel.
There are some quirks to figure out, sometimes the explosions will send unexploded shells flying towards you, particularly in slow motion, and cause significant emotional events. Still, I found it pretty fun to mess around with and decided to share it, glad you liked it!
The fuselage parts on those stabilizers must have required ridiculous amounts of patience. It certainly paid off, because it looks beautifully smooth. Very well done.
+1@TheFantasticTyphoon Fool! I have already stepped into n-th generation fighter design!
(yes, I made that one solely for the laughs. I do weird things when I'm bored.)
+1Now that's one plane you don't see very often! Beautiful rendition of this magnificent Marcel Dassault piece.
@Z3RO Absolutely. It looks insanely cool too, sadly I wasn't able to reeally replicate the looks or feel of the weapon but I tried my best lel.
@Mitchellwi Yeah, it wasn't my intention to submit it into the challenge (as said in the first line of the description). This is based on the plane I submitted back then, and I forgot to erase the URL from the .xml file.
Let me tell you a story, back when I was just a gunnery officer...
The level of detail on this is just... Wow. Man, absurd levels of patience here.
Next thing, you'll tell me that piano actually works...
+2An unguided rocket with a scaled bomb that doesn't go haywire on launch? Man, I needed this in my life! My attempts to do something like this previously have all resulted in the rocket going absolutely bonkers as soon as it's fired.
@Alta2809 Well, with over a thousand downloads I don't know if I'd call it underrated, lol. Perhaps some people are just tired of reading/scrolling through the long descriptions to upvote the thing, but they're an integral part of my creative process so they're not going anywhere anytime soon.
And thanks a lot, man! To be fair, I don't think I'm ever going to make something as complicated as that gunsight, lol. I do have some ideas in mind though, but I'm cooling down for a bit.
+1@DickBrazen Thank you for the comment! I'm glad this was of use to you. About the altimeter, one of the big issues I had here was how I was having to work with small parts, which can get really annoying at times. I really wouldn't want to go with pieces much smaller than the ones I used here. Also, altimeters IRL usually work in this way; some only have two hands, for 1000 and 100 feet, but others like this one have three hands for 100, 1000 and 10000 feet, an as far as my research found, usually with a similar hand size arrangement. I did take artistic liberties in making the 10k ft hand red, however, for quicker reading.
+2@Mustang51 Lol, no need man. I'm already more than happy with just having taken part on it.
This has got to be the best challenge I've participated in so far, and certainly the one with the highest quantity of amazing builds! I had a great deal of fun with this one, and the winners are indeed well deserved. That Martin Mauler caught my eye as soon as I saw it, man, those dive brakes.
@Zanedavid Thanks! Yeah, I should probably have set them a bit further apart, but look on the bright side - they're in front of the cockpit, so if the propellers suffer some catastrophic failure they're not flying at you. If you want something really stress-inducing, look at the IA 58 Pucará... That thing has the propellers almost grazing the canopy and in-line with the pilot. It was actually used as an example of "do not do this" in a conceptual aircraft design book I read a long time ago.
Absolutely stunning level of detail right here. You captured the smoothness of the aircraft's lines pretty well, really gives it that trademark Messerschmitt feeling.
+1@Ardanikova yes
I haven't even used 50% of my power yet
@Giantwhale I've been thinking about that since the update came out but I have a long list of other things I want to do first.
@ChisP Some of my other builds might have a thing or two to say about that, lol.
@BACconcordepilot Not on my watch
Wait, this got featured? Now there's something I wasn't expecting! Thanks, mods!
Now this is effort. Congratulations, man.
+1@emanuelga Thank you! I've got to admit, I went for looks before functionality in this one, lol.
+1@emanuelga Yes, even here in South America, there was a surprising number of concepts and sometimes even prototypes that never were to be. Argentina is the SA champion in the "cool airplane designs that never went into service" department, but I was surprised to find a book the other day with a bunch of abandoned Embraer projects and concepts, most of them for transport and cargo aircraft but some for attack jets that kind of looked like a small Su-25 and even light fighters.
+2the 60's and 70's were an amazing time for crazier projects like this, lel. Very well done replica!
+1@TheFantasticTyphoon You read through it? You have bravery in you! lol, yeah,these backstories write themselves in my head as I design the aircraft, and I've got to write it somewhere right? Glad you enjoyed it!
+3@teodor99 Thanks! "Funky Trees" is the name the devs gave to the new system implemented in 1.9 that essentially lets you write more advanced control inputs for parts like control surfaces, rotators, pistons, etc. In this case I used very basic ones for the instruments, and a far more headache-inducing one for the gunsight.
Seeing for yourself is probably going to be better than me trying to explain.
@SodiumChloride Man, you were fast! Last night I was posting the prototype variant as an unlisted aircraft, and accidentaly uploaded it as public. I deleted it as soon as I realized my mistake, but you upvoted it as soon as it went up so I thought you'd be interested - here it is! Sorry for the confusion.
+1@SnoWFLakE0s Absolutely no problem, the advice you did manage to give proved to be crucial.
As for the suggestion, that would indeed help in making it stand out, but as this is supposed to "emulate" a WWII-era collimator sight, realistically it'd all be the same color. I could indeed make it a very slight change, but for this next plane I'm already stranded on the color palette, lol. In any case, thanks a lot!
@ChiyomiAnzai Gotta have that i m m e r s i o n
+1Holy moly, this is absolutely jaw-dropping. Massive T .
@Mustang51 Most excellent! Mind if I ask you what your timezone is again? I don't expect to take that long, but who knows, lel
@MrPorg137 Thanks, man!
@Mustang51 Just to clear a doubt up, we've got until January 7 starts or until it ends? I ask because I'm making a third build and now that I fixed some of its problems I need to touch it up and write a description, lol. Not that it'd be a problem if I can't get it finished in time, two submissions is already a lot and frankly more than I was expecting to do.
@SnoWFlakE0s I think I've figured out issue no. 1: my "Time" calculations appear to be messed up, lol. I'll re-do them, use your clamp advice and see if it works.
this one for sure. The fact it uses the smoke trails mod might have been a factor but it can be flown without the mod parts with no issue. It's also no fun if you haven't read at least a bit of the description and pulled a few Kulbits with it.
The Libélula was another one that surprised me a bit because it's just a huge joy to fly around. I can see why though honestly, it's pretty simple and has its issues, such as the scale being off.
I cannot really complain about anything though, because on the other hand, the large flying wing I posted just after the Garrucha, for instance, garnered a lot, but a lot more attention than I could ever have expected. I made that one when I was bored and frankly have no idea why it did so well.
+2Great looking! Very smooth shape and unique design.
@SnoWFLakE0s My apologies for the late response, I was in fact not expecting such a quick reply, thank you for devoting a bit of your time and attention for this. I have in fact already drawn a diagram, it was the first thing I did while trying to piece this thing together lel. It's absolutely vital to sketch things prior to throwing yourself at them at least in my experience, I need that visual feedback. I'll be trying to take some good pictures of the sketches in the meantime. How would you prefer I send them to you? I don't think one can make an unlisted forum post, well in any case I could upload the system itself and its testbed plane with the pictures attached to the description.
Continuning, didn't realize the comment would be cut halfway through, my bad.
...which is expected.
So I'd like to ask if you would like to help me with this, or in case that isn't possible, perhaps a few pointers, as I am rather lost; in that case I'd make a post or something to send you the calculations I've done and the inputs I've tried to make - who knows, maybe one of my premises is wrong, I made a mistake somewhere along the calculations themselves or I have done them in a less than code-friendly way. I'm almost sure it's a mistake somewhere in the input statement itself, though. I basically wrote an equation and tried to "translate" it to the Funky Trees syntax; I have very little experience or knowledge in this area, I've done a little bit of Matlab for college about a year ago, but only basic stuff so far (they threw us in without even an introduction to coding) and given the amount of times I've sent things into infinite loops, I wouldn't exactly trust my skills there, lel.
Again, my sincere apologies for the trouble and for extending myself for so long. I had to ask because it's been boggling my mind quite a bit.
@SnoWFLakE0s First of all, I apologize for the extent of this post, but I'd like to ask for help with something, if it isn't too much trouble of course; it's a small thing, and not really necessary for the build I'm doing right now, I could do without it, it'd just be a nifty thing to have.
I've been trying to make a dive-bombing gunsight display, and while doing the calculations on paper is not a big problem, turning it into something that works in SimplePlanes has been an extremely confusing... experience so far. The basis of the equations isn't too different from what you did with your bombsight, it's still a bomb trajectory problem after all, but the system is different in that instead of a rotator turning at a given angle, it's a piston that pushes a "reticle" downwards in such a way that from the operator's view, when the bomb impact point crosses the target, the reticle will be seen on top of the target as well. This of course needs some extra angles to be calculated (as well as the distance from the cockpit to the "reticle" being known and input), but nothing too complicated, and then a tangent will finally give you the "x" distance the reticle needs to depress, with meters as the unit. Since piston travel distance "1" = 1 meter in my testing, this should be doable - at least in theory.
In practice, the piston always pushes the reticle up instead of down, no matter how many times I have selected "invert = true" or attempted to invert the input statement itself with minuses. This is the least of my problems though, as the piston seems to quickly try going to absurd values, even to the point of exceeding the piston travel distance of 1 meter by far, sometimes so violently it sends the plane into a spin on the pitch axis! It would be frankly hilarious to watch if it weren't frustrating.
I also intended to make it so the reticle would never go up, instead its maximum input would be 0 so it would always either rest at its central location or depress as the aircraft went into a dive - with its maximum depression (min input) also set so the reticle would never go below the sight's "collimator", in this case a very thin hollow fuselage, lol. Of course, the sight as of present doesn't even go down to begin with, so I have no way to properly test this but I'd like to know if it can be done. It doesn't seem to behave quite in the same manner as "normal" inputs would, though I've noted if I set both min and max to 0 it doesn't move at all, which is ex
There are simply not enough words for this build, it's amazing. The level of detail is mindblowing, and a functional Garmin suite in SP? You guys are actually insane, lol. I wish I could upvote this twice, one for your work and effort, and another for your pains and suffering.
Congrats on majoring in aerospace, by the way! It's a difficult road to take, as someone who chose to start treading it as well; but so far, it's been a very interesting one. Ever since the plane bug bit me, I couldn't see myself anywhere else.
You'll have challenges ahead of you, as I'm sure you have noticed already lel, but challenges someone with your level of determination and effort will surely overcome. Because holy expletive, man... 1600 parts... Imagine adjusting all that. I shudder at the mere thought.
+6@SnoWFLakE0s Oh, you mean a manual FCS, like those targeting tables used in WWI/WWII combat vessels? My brain kinda forgot these also count as FCS for a while, lol. Yeah, this could work, and a numerical display would indeed make its use a lot easier.
@SnoWFLakE0s Perhaps you could post it as an unlisted build (instead of public), and provide a link to it in your original post? It's what I do when I've got multiple variants of the same plane without much changing between them.
And you make me curious; do you something in mind for an FCS system? I'd think (in my infinite lack of creativity) it would be impossible to make one right now given you can't input any target data. If in the future we do get target data as inputs - range, bearing, and if they really want to go all out, relative velocity - then that would open up a lot of possibilities. FCS, automated gun turrets, RWR displays.
How did I not know about this yet? Fantastic build of a legendary car.
Man, if you found a way to integrate this into your gunnery system (for ranging information and the like), that would be fantastic. Not that it isn't any less amazing as is.
Keep up the brilliant work, I must say all of this has inspired me to start trying my hand at making something like a Stuvi gunsight. You show people it's possible to do amazing things in SP, and I'm sure many others are also motivated by your endeavours.
+1Do I see two RWRs, one American and one Russian-like model? I hope they're just for the looks because if you actually made working RWR I will live in great fear of your truly immense power, as I don't think that's even possible right now and as such, would probably be wizardry.
Top tier build right there. No other words left.
This is amazing. Completely beyond words. The level of detail is mindblowing, and a Garmin suite? You guys are insane, lol. I wish I could upvote twice, one for your work and one for your pains.
Congrats on majoring in aerospace, by the way! It's a difficult road to walk as someone who decided to start treading it as well, but so far it's been a very interesting one.