Curtis L. Olson writes: > I'm starting to ponder the idea of implimenting a simple C172 > electrical system. I know it would be nice to develop some grand > system so you could model any aircraft's electrical system of any > complexity all in xml. I probably don't have time for that, and I'll > want to start small and relatively simple.
Before you start, I've been thinking of implementing a new Systems subdirectory which could manage the vacuum system, electrical system, and static-pitot system initially. We need this if we're going to use FlightGear for IFR training. The steam instruments can then take their input from the system, and we can use properties to implement failure modes. Alex suggested something like this a while back. > But, even if I do something simple, this could have a pretty far > reaching impact. Each instrument would have to check the status of > the electrical system (voltage? on/off?) when deciding how to draw > itself. The engine shouldn't turn over/start if their is no > battery/alternator. The only primary flight instrument that runs off DC power is the turn coordinator; otherwise, you'd only have to worry about the avionics (and of course, the flaps in many planes). We can start the engine with a flat battery, but we'll have to animate a (one-armed?) person walking up to the prop and pulling it for us. > We'd also want to consider failures as well ... bad battery, bad > alternator -- fuses? Yes. Let's generalize this quickly, or we'll have an unholy mess. > If the alternator fails or is turned off, we might want to model > limited battery life. That would be part of modelling the electrical system. We can start with the system standalone, but eventually everything will have to state how much power it is drawing. > Has anyone put any thought into implimenting electrical systems? Yes, I've been thinking about all of the major systems. For licensed pilots, it will be nice to have a horror-flight mode, where at least one thing is guaranteed to go wrong at some point: some problems (jammed elevator trim, reversed aileron cranks, etc.) can be caught in the preflight, while others will occur in the air or during the takeoff roll. All the best, David -- David Megginson, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.megginson.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
