Introduction
FlightGear is an open source flight simulator that is even used in flight schools to train basic maneuvers, radio communication and navigation tasks. I became aware of this project 3 years ago and have build my own hangar with 18 aircraft and vehicles.
My first contact with programming an aircraft was the old Antonov-12 as the existing model in FlightGear has no steering, no instruments and very bad flight behavior.
By working on the cockpit for half a year I got the basic instrumentation knowledge and the ability to make changes in Blender and Gimp to fit all together in a realistic manner.
Much more time goes into the Multiplayer animations and adjusting the FDM (Flight Dynamyic Model). You may load 120 paratroopers or 6 cargo-boxes and drop them via parachutes to any simulated mission you like to do.
An other big task was the "rembrandt" light system in FlightGear which makes lights as realistic as possible. It means that all instruments and parts had to be defined for the normal light system and this special one.
In this article I want to introduce my development of Antonov-12BK.
Characteristics
- Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-12
- Wingspan 124 ft 8 in
- Lenght 108 ft 7 in
- Height 34 ft 7 in
- Empty weight 62000 lb
- Payload 66,140 lb
- Engines 4 x Progress AI-20M turboprops (4000 hp each)
- Max speed 777 km/h (419 kt)
- Cruise speed 670 km/h (361 kt)
Development steps
- More than 260 commits on github would be to much to write down here
- Various video productions with flights uploaded on Youtube and documented on Steemit.
Link to the repository
https://github.com/HerbyW/AN-12BK
Proof of work
In my profile on Utopian.io, the github repo AN-12BK is listed in my project
page, which is show in the screenshot as follows:
The login page on github.com is shown in the following screenshot:
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors