Maachi C.205 Veltro

The Veltro is progressing and flyable. I just started looking for the author, Alessandro "Alex" Casadio, to get permission to release it in the hangar. It still needs a lot of work, but it sure is pretty already.

Grumman F3F project

This airplane is visually interesting, but I think it'll be underpowered and visibility will be poor. Carrier landings might be a bear. The model is based on a Paul Clawson F3F for FS98. The original was a bit too low-poly for today's technology, so I'm replacing everything piece by piece, using the original as a scaffold. Gear retraction is going to be interesting too!

A-1H ordnance load

Trying to decide on an ordnance load for the A-1H Skyraider, USAF version. Here is an interesting website on typical loads for an A-1. The CBU-25 looked interesting, so I made some of these bomblet dispensers from circa 1970. We don't have CBU yet in FlightGear, AFAIK, so the submodels for it should be interesting. And we don't have troops as targets yet, so the CBU may not be very useful.

Wheel spin

Modeling tip here. Spinning wheels in FlightGear use the "spin" animation, which is looking for an input using the units "rpm", or rotations per minute. I base the input on a property available in JSBSim called "fdm/jsbsim/gear/unit[n]/wheel-speed-fps". Be sure to change the "n" in the property name to match the number of your gear unit, as defined in the FDM configuration. For most of my models unit 0 is the nose gear, unit 1 is the left main, and unit 2 is the right main, but you should check the FDM config to make sure.

So, how many rpm's does a wheel of diameter "D" (in meters) spin at when moving at "wheel-speed-fps"? I use (5.82 / D). I'm going through all my models now and changing this because I had previously guessed that the spin animation units were degrees/sec, but I was wrong.

BTW, using separate speeds for each wheel allows them to spin realistically in a turn. Zoom in on one of the models in the hangar while it's in a tight turn on the ground, and you'll see the inside main wheel turning at a slower speed than the outside main wheel.

DavePack bug fix

Fixed a bug in the Mk-81 XML's. Reduced LOD range for bombs to 2 kilometers. Indentation cleanup.

Weapons fixes

NicQ has added some fixes to the DavePack bombs and rockets. This should make them behave better. New version is 3.9.

OpenAL pitch

I've been working with NicQ on sound files for the piston engined airplanes, and we've found out some interesting things about the way OpenAL handles sound pitch. First, the API wants octaves as a pitch input, with "1" representing the unmodified sound file. Therefore, a pitch input of 0.5 means one octave lower, and a pitch input of 2.0 means one octave higher. That means that the pitch value needs to be: log2(input/ref) + 1.0, where "ref" is a reference value associated with the pitch of the unmodified sound file, and "input" is a flightgear property value to be compared with "ref". For example, if you have a sound file which represents the engine sound at 1000 rpm, then "ref" is 1000, and "input" is the property "engines/engine[n]/rpm".

One other thing, OpenAL appears to limit the pitch modification to +/- one octave. This means that to create sound for an rpm range of 500-3000 you would need two sounds to cover the range.

Lots of new stuff

New DavePack, F-105, Mirage-IIIC, MiG-21 (formerly known as MiG-21MF), AD-4, AD-6, and F-106.

DavePack 3.7

As part of my effort to get the large piston engines sounding right I've added some new sound files to DavePack. These files are non GPL-able, so I've given DavePack a "Freeware, non-commercial" license now. I also included some pilot models in the last version of DavePack which are non GPL-able, so I'm a bit late with the license change.

New MiG-21 on the way

FlightGear user "eRobo" is working on a new MiG-21 model. If seen it, taken it for a test drive, and can say it's a great model! The MiG's in my hangar are based on some older, low-poly models from AlphaSim, and there's only so much that can be done with them. eRobo plans to hangar the MiG at FG CVS.