Flight Simulation projects by Dino Cattaneo. Current home to the T-45C Goshawk, F-14D Tomcat, S-3B Viking and F-35 Lightning II projects for Flight Simulator X:Acceleration and Prepar3D v3.0. Also: opinions, reviews and findings about recreational flight simulation and flight games.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Some screenshots of the new T-45... including cockpit images!
Thursday, April 21, 2011
The real F-35 Full Mission Simulator
As my previous post was about the real T-45C simulator, here is a picture of the first real "Full Mission" Simulator of the F-35, recently delivered by Lockheed Martin to Eglin Air Force Base's 33rd Fighter Wing.
Obviously this simulator sports state-of-the-art fidelity and realism, as well as a top-notch visualization system and, of course, can be set to simulate all the variants of the F-35.
Back to videogames (yes...I am a blasphemer...I still consider FSX just a videogame...) I have some good news. Meaning that I've made some significant progress with the T-45C student/pilot cockpit...and graphically I'd say it is 90% complete - I just miss some minor details here and there and I'd like to redo a couple of textures. It looks good IMHO. It is mostly "hand-drawn" meaning it looks less photographic and a little more stylized - but it is also much closer to the real deal - and IMHO it is closer to the general graphic style of FSX (& Flight - I hope that it will be possible to port it to the new simulator). Long story short it looks better than the previous one - and it is also less resouce-intensive so that it may be possible to model the instructor cockpit too (albeit I will probably not replicate some minor differences between the two cockpits that are there in the real plane - like different layout of external lights controls to name one). Still the instructor cockpit presence is not confirmed - I may not have time to complete it in a reasonable time.
I will post some WIP pictures of the new cockpit as soon as I've placed all the missing details - probably during the next weekend.