[Echelon9]

Plenty have thought this would be a nice addition to bring Diaspora and The Viper project together. Well done to the team for making it happen!

http://blog.makezine.com/2013/05/15/the-viper-2-0/

The Viper was one of the most popular projects at Maker Faire Bay Area last year, blowing minds, creating smiles, and eliciting screams of excitement. The Viper is a full-motion Battlestar Galactica-themed flight simulator built into the fuselage of a Piper PA-28 plane, complete with 360-degree rotation on both the pitch and roll axes, as well as a fully immersive flying environment inside. The most amazing part is that The Viper was made by a team of five high school students, guided by their mentors, as part of the Young Makers program. The Viper is coming back to Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, May 18 and 19, and it promises to be even more impressive.

Project mentor Tony DeRose sent us this update:

    In last year’s version the game running in the cabin was an open source simulator called FlightGear. The experience in the cabin was a terrestrial flight, taking off from virtual SFO. The flight dynamics were that of a Boeing 777, so the virtual plane wasn’t very maneuverable. Flying over San Francisco in a 777 wasn’t consistent with the Battlestar Galactica theming.

    In this year’s version the pilot is completely immersed in the Battlestar Galactica universe. The game running in the cabin this year is Diaspora, a freeware Battlestar Galactica-themed game that the team has modified to drive the motion platform. The pilot flies a space mission to save the Theseus, a Battlestar similar in design to Galactica. The Viper 2.0 is equipped with lots of weapons to shoot down Cylon raiders, and is capable of very high performance acrobatics. Although we can’t let the public fly The Viper at Maker Faire, we are setting up a squadron of laptops for the public to fly against our pilots in a multi-player dog fight.

[karajorma]

There's another article on the same subject here.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

One thing I've been wondering about since I found the articles yesterday and read the comments complaining about gravity.  Do Vipers have artificial gravity?  I believe it was seen in at least one episode where a Raptor did (crew/marines able to stand and walk normally while in flight).   

[FreeSpaceFreak]

[...] Diaspora, a freeware Battlestar Galactica-themed game that the team has modified to drive the motion platform.

Wait, they actually implemented acceleration onset cueing in FSO? If that's true, we should ask them for their code
Either way, more well-deserved exposure for Diaspora!

[Echelon9]

Yes, I read that with interest.

Do they frequent these forums?

[karajorma]

I've had a few chats with Samuel Frank already. There was a post on the internal when they first contacted us about using Diaspora.

I was going to give them a few more days and then get in contact with them again about the code.

[niffiwan]

Wow - I can't get over how awesome that is!

Here's a video I found, damn shame the game video was corrupted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ndKQj6sHc

[David cgc]

Cool stuff. I wonder how much one of those would set me back. Heck, two, one for the Mark 2/3, one for the Mark 7.

[...] Diaspora, a freeware Battlestar Galactica-themed game that the team has modified to drive the motion platform.

Wait, they actually implemented acceleration onset cueing in FSO?

I'm not sure. From the way it was moving in the video, it looks like the sim was being driven by the player's rotation relative to the game's 0° x 0° x 0° axis. The host wouldn't have been upside-down so much if it was positioning the simulator so that gravity was aligned with the player's net force (that's the first time I've used high school physics in a while). Well, unless he was just going around and around in downward-pointing circles. On the other hand, that could just be editing the funniest bits, and we didn't see what was going on in-game while the simulator was moving.

One thing I've been wondering about since I found the articles yesterday and read the comments complaining about gravity.  Do Vipers have artificial gravity?  I believe it was seen in at least one episode where a Raptor did (crew/marines able to stand and walk normally while in flight).   

They never said. On the one hand, you'd think they'd need some kind of Star Wars style antigravs to take off and land on planets with those skids in place of wheels and the tiny little thrusters they have. On the other hand, the only on-screen thing they said was when they were building the Blackbird and one of the pilots said the cockpit wasn't centered, so the ship couldn't maneuver like a Viper, which says they don't have AG or inertial dampers.

So, probably not?

[newman]

Considering there's no room to walk around inside a Viper, I would speculate that it would be much simpler and cheaper to just have the pilot strap in and be done with it. But it's anyone's guess.

[Black Wolf]

Not to read too much into a fictional universe, but given that they have artificial gravity in the BSGverse, they'd be silly not to use that tech to mitigate G forces in the fighters (if it was practical from a size/mass/energy use perspective). However, we know that they don't do that (at least, not 100%) since Starbuck's ability to handle G forces was a plot point when she hurt herself once, IIRC. So it's possible they don't use it, or that it's simply impractical on anything the size of a Viper, or that it can't generate enough to fully cancel out the G forces.

All that aside, I'd be amazed if this thing did more than extract the existing orientation data and feed that to the sim, given that that data is already available with scripts or sexps. Trying to simulate forces in space using earth's gravity would feel entirely wrong 99% of the time.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I would suspect that without networked computer systems for the control movements to tell the gravity computer how to immediately compensate it would always be playing catch up.  Good enough to cut the forces enough to keep the pilot alive during high speed maneuvers in and out of atmo but not enough to prevent the pilot from being able to still overdue it.   

Of course the 1CW war raider not having it could be why you always saw it pull up in turns in the TOS.  Had to keep those 3 centurions from hitting the ceiling without seat belts. 

[David cgc]

All that aside, I'd be amazed if this thing did more than extract the existing orientation data and feed that to the sim, given that that data is already available with scripts or sexps. Trying to simulate forces in space using earth's gravity would feel entirely wrong 99% of the time.

It works well enough for motion simulator rides like Star Tours. Combined with the video screens, any movement that even vaguely corresponds to what's going on in the game would probably sell. It wouldn't have to be able to fool an actual astronaut, just give you a kick when you speed up, slow down, turn, or get hit.

[Aurel Tristen]

Wow.  I may be crazy, but I think I may have played a part in this.  As soon as I finished playing Diaspora, I sent an Email to those guys asking if they had heard of it (figuring they'd been told about it 100's of times by now) and they said they hadn't heard of it and would take a look. ^_^

I myself am probably buying one of these.  Diasoira is a major factor in my wanting it.  I doubt it would be sturdy enough for a motion platform though

[Aesaar]

Wouldn't the fact that gravity can't be disabled be easily resolved by making the contraption vertically oriented, with up being forward?

Might be tricky to get into, though.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Wouldn't the fact that gravity can't be disabled be easily resolved by making the contraption vertically oriented, with up being forward?

Well, you would constantly feel as if you were accelerating. Which is probably not quite the desired effect either.