The Accidental Weblog

So one of the beautiful things about the modern world, for those of us practicing crashing remote-control aircraft is: you can do your first crashes on virtual remote control aircraft.

It’s really a lot cheaper. Compare and contrast: on the real field, with the actual, physical model, you screw up the landing, days or weeks may follow of rebuilding broken bits of balsa and Monokote, pulling the engine apart, removing any grit that might screw up the rotor in the carburetor or scratch the cylinder walls, and so on. Depending a bit on how hard you hit the ground and where. Oh, and also, the cost may be anywhere from a few cents worth of glue (very lucky) or several hundred dollars worth of engine (less lucky).

Whereas on the virtual one, you press the big red button, the model magically reassembles itself, and you are immediately ready to crash it yet again. No glue nor engine rebuilds required.

So much more efficient. And you can crash so many more models, so quickly and effectively. Go through a John McCain navy career* worth of splintered fuselages and engines, all in half an afternoon. And you don’t even have to refuel or recharge, on, y’know, the rare occasions when you don’t actually crash.

And they’re pretty good programs, generally. Not quite the same as flying the real thing, no, but they do get your thumbs used to the controls in a much lower-risk and lower-cost environment than the real flying field, at the very least. And a lot of how real planes really move really is in there. Wing stalls can happen. If your engine cuts out (or you cut it out on purpose for practice) the nose will drop as fast as the real-world plane equivalent would do. And you’ll have to work just as hard to set up and maintain a clean, airspeed-conserving glide path to get the thing back on the virtual ground as you would in the real world. Do thirty hours on a simulator, and yes, you are very likely to find the real things a lot less intimidating, very likely to have the reflexes you need to avoid costly non-landings at least partly developed, anyway… And, again, for vastly less expense and risk than is likely to be incurred keeping a real plane in the air 30 hours.

But while lovely (I do own one), the closed-source commercial simulators tend to suffer from the usual problems of such software, as against the tastes of digital tinkerers such as myself. Such as: they don’t run on Linux, and are annoyingly difficult to customize. And when really the only (apart from work) Windows machine you run really isn’t much of a powerhouse, this also adds up to relatively slow, jerky simulations…

So wouldn’t it be lovely to have an open source R/C flight simulator that did the flight dynamics just as realistically? One in which if, say, you want a plane of a particular style to practice with, you can just build one in open-source 3D modelers and specify its flight dynamics in an .xml file and away you go? One which works with your radio and/or the interlink box you got with the commercial sim you already own? One which I can put on my rather more formidable Debian boxes and let loose?

It would be lovely. And it is lovely. For there is such a thing. The open source CRRCSim just happens to do all of that, and, tho’ a little bit less blessed with eye candy in the base install than its commercial cousins, so far as I can tell, even seems to be a little smarter about doing believable variable wind than is the closed source sim I own. Developed mostly by R/C glider enthusiasts, this is a sim that takes wind seriously, and gets it right.

And yes, true, since it’s a bit glider-centric, the powered model selection is also a bit lean in the base install. There’s an ‘aerobatics trainer’, but it’s pretty flighty, pretty feisty, a bit of a handful, especially if you’ve nearly-first timers not yet into adolescence trying to nail their first landings on the thing… Breathe on the aileron stick, it’s pretty much corkscrewing wildly through the air, yeah, true enough. One of those planes. Traumatizingly realistic, even.

But then, since all you have to do to set up a more mild-mannered trainer more suited to absolute beginners just trying to get back to the ground in one piece is break out the 3D modelers, sketch one in the air and mess around with an .xml file to specify its various flight characteristics, this is less of a problem than you might think. If, y’know, you’re comfortable messing around with 3D modelers.

… so I have done so. Built this huge orange and white monstrosity that floats back to the runway roughly as aggressively as a hot air balloon. And introduced it to my budding flyers. And posted it online, for anyone else who might need such a thing. All in the spirit of open source, fairly enough.

So here’s to CRRCSim. A great little bit of ‘ware in which to repeatedly demolish virtual planes.

(More behind that: yes, I’m flying again this year. Or, more accurately, I’m more likely to be ground crew, most of the time, since the kids are both asking to do some more serious training this year, so my pretty OS Engines .46 AX is going to be busy in the trainer they’re going to be learning in. Not sure if I’m going to set up a plane more to my current skills… Do have other things I think I might want to be doing with the sunny days I’m not on such duties… Guess we’ll see.)