Flight dynamic model

The flight dynamics don''t have much to do with what API you program in - rather look for straight physics information - try some varsity textbooks

Chris

One of the classic texts on flight dynamics is: "Dynamics of Flight: Stability and Control, second edition," by Bernard Etkin. May be out of print now, but it is an extremely popular book among aeronautical engineers. Its published by John Wiley & Sons, originally in 1958 then in 1982. The ISBN is 0-471-08936-2.

This book focuses (as most do) on linear flight dynamics. But it does present the full nonlinear equations of motion of a rigid airplane. The tricky part is figuring out to simulate *those* in a way that is stable and robust. Not easy at all.

You may also need a good reference on aerodynamics. You do need to be able to calculate lift, drag, and pitching moment for 2D flight and rolling moment, yawing moment, and side force in addition for 3D flight. And since you're not interested in steady-state flight, you'll need to be able to compute pitch, roll, yaw damping, etc.----dynamic stability derivatives----to get something that looks realistic. You can do simple table linear interpolation to begin with, but you may want to do some more sophisticated interpolation once everything's working. Here is a book about that:

"Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach," by Daniel P. Raymer. Published by AIAA in their education series in 1989, and 1992. I think there is a newer third edition. ISBN 0-930403-51-7.

Go to a university library first, or you may be out $150 or so for these books.

I wrote a nonlinear flight simulator that is now used in the glider and frisbee/flying disc simulations in the WorldBook Multimedia Encyclopedia and it works pretty well. You can do loops and stall, etc. But I have a Master's degree in aeronautics. You'd best start with the linear simulations. That is pretty much laid out for you in Etkin. You'll *still* have to use your imagination a bit, since he (as most authors do) focus on frequency domain simulation which is not all that helpful when you want to do a flight simulator. You can do the linear stuff in the time domain, but it just makes it harder to read the book.

I think there was a crappy book a few years ago that was written specifically to talk about writing flight simulator programs for PC's. As I recall, it basically had everything. Graphics, flight modeling, windows programming introduction, everything. I don't expect it was a good or even accurate book. But it *may* be decent if you're just getting started. Add the good stuff once you have a shell.

Hope this helps.



Graham Rhodes
Senior Scientist
Applied Research Associates, Inc.

Edited by - grhodes_at_work on November 7, 2000 12:03:51 PM

I''m just wondering, just to add to this topic...
I am working on a space shooter. I don''t want to write a complex phisics engine, just something that looks real. Do you know of any books that cover this?

Thanks.

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Original post by kill

I''m just wondering, just to add to this topic...
I am working on a space shooter. I don''t want to write a complex phisics engine, just something that looks real. Do you know of any books that cover this?

Thanks.

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That should be a lot easier. I would just look in one of the introduction to 3D game programming books (e.g., one of Andre LaMothe''s books) and look at the section that talk about rigid body dynamics. You won''t have to deal with articulating bodies---just one body for each space ship. And you may not have to do any collision detection. You''ll just need to be able to handle a rotating body subject to things like forces due to thrusters and maybe some force due to a laser blast. This is fairly straightforward and simple to code.



Graham Rhodes
Senior Scientist
Applied Research Associates, Inc.