Simple Planes

[ShrikeHawk]

Has anyone out there tried the game, "Simple Planes"? I wasn't sure how much I would like it, but now I love it. It's a "sandbox game" where you can construct your own aircraft and then fly it. You can even make vehicles and cars too. It comes with many challenges to test your building skills. There's a massive modding community out there offering planes, terrains, gizmos and everything in between.

 

One of my favorite challenges is "Short Landing" where you must land a plane on the very very very small carrier USS Tiny. Oh, and it has no arrestor gear! So it's a real challenge to get a plane to land on it without any damage. I've been fiddling a lot with this lately. I'm very interested in STOL aircraft and making my own is great fun. Here's a video of a few of my landings with planes of my own design.

 

[Nyghtfall]

This is fun! Thanks for sharing.

 

My 1st Landing. At least it didn't explode. ;)

 

 

[+JediMaster]

Someone finally resurrected this concept?

 

I was doing this over 20 years ago in Domark's Flight Sim Toolkit. It was fun aside from the fact that a plane wouldn't fly "right" if you copied it in there. You needed to fudge it.

 

There was two parts for each plane--the 3d model (what you see) and the 2d flight model (how the game calculates it should fly). Make the 2D FM look like the 3D model and usually it wouldn't fly. So you tweak the 2D layout and other stats until it flies properly, but the 2D shape had no similarity to the 3D at that point.

 

Still, great fun making your own planes.

[ShrikeHawk]

This isn't nearly so complicated. This parts sort of snap together like magnets. Some improbable structures actually work and will fly, though you cannot violate the laws of physics too much. Make an unbalanced airplane and it won't fly too well. Still, it's lots of fun watching your own creation go. You can even get (or build) fairly decent facsimiles of historical aircraft. Here's a working Do-24 I made.

 

 

Here's an RAF Short Tucano I downloaded for free.