I’ve been ooing and ahhhing for years now at the excellent quality of some of the home built Sim cockpits out there. Clearly there are people dedicating serious time and money to their sim experiences.
It’s always been an ambition to do a similar project and for the last couple of months I’ve been hoarding pictures of the A380: My idea being that It’would be a really good ‘pit to build if I should eventually get around to it.
The trouble is that not only are scale/detail pictures hard to come but also the pit is full of (expensive) LCD Panels.
Work is a bit slow at the moment, so in the last couple of weeks I started looking in earnest again at the ‘pit build idea.
After discarding the A380 idea as technically difficult, very expensive, not to mention too big for the only available room in the house, I looked for something smaller.
Next on the ‘hit list’ was Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne. This was, I think, an inspired idea, but it too quickly fell by the wayside: Hard to build due to compound curves and inability to run generic games with it (fully enclosed cockpit with portholes). Also Scaled were unable to assist with cockpit layout etc.
I’ve always been worried about the cost of such an endeavour, particulary when reading about the exploits of builders trying to find exact matches for particular knobs and dials etc. Coupled with this: the infamous EPIC cards cost quite literally an arm and a leg.
With this in mind I found an excellent picture reference of a generic build and not only is it a good design but also it makes use of a far cheaper IO mechanism than EPIC.
Finally then, this design has inspired me to have a go.
Expect more news soon on this topic!
TurboTas 2004