Version 0.9 (28. April 2000), Tomi Engel

Since the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor (build by Boeing & Bell) is a very interesting development in flight technology, I have decided to try writing my own little simulation program. The simulation should allow playing with possible flight control mechanisms. This is interesting since a tiltrotor aircraft like the V-22 can act as a helicopter or airplane plus having a transition configuration which is hard to define (a heliplane ?).

Feature Check

At this time FarmersOsprey is focused on providing an animateable 3D model of the aircraft. The physical aspects of flight simulation have to wait for a distant future. The main purpose in the short term is to have a test application for a planned replacement of NeXTs 3DKit. It should offer RenderMan and OpenGL integration with a more Cocoa-like feeling.

The current implementation has not evolved beyond "proof of concept" and is far from being really something useful. But hey ... at least there is something in 3D that fills the screen and eats your CPU time

Flight Technology

Interesting technical details about the aircraft can be found at the NASA tiltrotor web site. Many details about aeroacoustics, fluid mechanics and wing design can be found online too. For wing design we are currently developing another application called FarmersWinglet which will support the construction of wing profiles.

There is also a commercial flight simulation program which offers the V-22 as one of its options. Since I have neither seen the game (X-Plane) nor the real "thing" it is hard to say how accurate the simulation is. I might have to check it out.

Package Download

The application is available for download in the following packages:

Note: Please make sure that you also have the required frameworks installed on your system!

Since our server might not be the fastest, we encourage you to search for the files in some of the well known archives if necessary. We recommend: www.peanuts.org (Germany), ftp.beng.org (Germany) and next-ftp.peak.edu (USA). In addition to that we would like to point you to the stepwise softrak service which can direct you to other interesting applications.

Future development

The topic of flight simulation is really complex and I do not feel that there is enough time to push into that direction. But we might revive the 3D library if nothing RenderMan friendly pops up in the next few month.