Alien spaceship simulator

good for flight, over done for race

Lol Driving sim FAIL!!!!

You should see how many times I get linked of facebook for the damn force dynamics 401 , the video of it with F1 game going all over the place.
People say thats real and they want one like that.
Yeah right! Go buy one then.

I also get the facebook posts from these ridiculous rigs and people Drooool all over them its hilarious. If they only knew how wrong they were.

Isnt that thing like 50K$?

$50k to $70k . yes. I have people see my sims, and without trying them, they go for a search on the net, see videos like that and try to tell me mine is wrong.
I tell them to jump on mine for an hour, then go jump on a 401. Oh thats right! there are NO 401 in Australia.
Ive had 6 professional dirt/tarmac go kart teenagers whom are ALL in the top 10% of the country and a former speedway driver play on the dual sims.
They all said that my sims are realistic in motion, obviously not like a car or kart, but excellent motion to recreate what the car is doing in game. Some of these kids have also played on motion sims 10 times the price of mine and guess what.
My rides RIVAL and slightly better them in motion.

It’s not the amount of movement in and of itself that’s the problem with the force dynamics and similar designs imo, it’s the amount of rotation that goes along with it. The first rig I built was designed to move in a similar way. I liked it at first but the feeling of rotation started to really bug me, especially at my feet, because it doesn’t feel natural. When your rigs design uses rotation (such as on a pivot) to utilize gravity to simulate forces, one must find balance between the amount of movement vs. the amount of rotation felt, which means less overall movement.

Another disadvantage with a large amount of movement with this type design is the simple fact that it takes longer to transition between forces such as feeling right sway vs left sway. And moving very fast to cover the longer transition will also lead to move of a tendency to overshoot the target at the other end, also feeling unnatural.

Oh yea, as far as the alien spaceship simulator is concerned, the bottom line is that the rewards don’t outweigh the challenges with this kind of design. After spending well over $1000 on motors, gearboxes, and power supplies to make a 2dof 360 degree design, I finally came to that conclusion. And what you end up with is not a simulator anyway, but an amusement ride more or less.

Also alien spaceship simulator implies outer space travel such as in elite dangerous. But in outer space there usually isn’t going to be gravity involved like here on earth unless you are close to large masses. But your simulator will be on earth so being upside down won’t feel right in any way. The better way would be to stay upright and pretend that the feeling of gravity is due to a gravity field created by the spacecraft itself to keep you attached to the floor. My 2 cents.

Well once you are concentrated on ace combat,pursuit or evasive maneuvers and being able to rotate in any angle you really don't care about g force's what you really want is freedom of motion just imagine all the maneuvers and all the kinds of vehicles or spacecraft's that you can operate with all three axis moving at the same time in a perfectly synchronized movement, I really want to try it.

The idea sounds great just making or buying one for the average man sounds very expensive!!

So you really don’t care about g-forces? Then you must be okay with it being an amusement ride then! If you really want to build it though, then I would really like to see it built! No kidding. It seems like it would be a fun ride which is why I was considering building one once. But it’s just not a “simulator” in my opinion.

Before going forward however, you need to figure out some things; mainly how you are going to transmit electricity thru several 360-degree continuous joints with enough amperage and without interfering noise being added. I see two possibilities to help do this, slip rings and wireless transmission where possible. Obviously power to the motors can’t be done wirelessly. But signals to motor controllers could be. Other things possible to do wirelessly could be a joystick or wheel, a keyboard, and even video. So, you must first considerer all the connections that must be made between your computer system and your motion control system and motors, and how you plan to power it all. Then you can attempt to determine where you are going to put everything and how you intend to connect it all together in your rig considering it's design.

I would like to make it very affordable not like a video game box but will see what we can do.

I will make it very affordable, but really isn't it boring to playing any racing car game in the same way all the time? let's put some clifs on the race track and drive thru them and when you are falling down you'll be rotating and then fall and race track and continue with the race.

Come on... were are the cameras?

I have a few suggestions for starting out with designs and ideas:

You need to be careful of gimbal lock when working with rotational axes like yours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal_lock
It introduces all sorts of headaches under certain circumstances. The solution which NASA uses to overcome it is to introduce a fourth gimbal (outermost ring) and actively drive it 90 out of phase with the inner gimbal.

As for investors, don't expect them to touch it unless you have a working small scale model and a sound business plan. As @bsft said as well, get your safety plans in place and design the machine around them, not the other way around.

Expect this thing to cost a fortune, I know mine will. That is why I am taking my time with the design (one of the reasons anyway), if I jump right in I will out of pocket quite a lot and have nothing to show for it.

Don't let this stop you though, I say go for it! Just plan it all out first. Good luck.

Know this. It will not be afordable. It will cost you 10k plus.

Thanks for the advice but really tell me the thruth isn't it like the last line of Sim at this time because look simulate any vehicle or aircraft and just imagine a race track for cars with cliffs where you could drive thru them and do a couple of flip's and land on the race track and continue the race another thing is that it will not rotate suddenly all three axis will be rotating slowly at the same time.

I know and I'm thinking on what can I do to rise the funds some guy's are giving me some tip's.

I was just making a comment on all the maneuvers that you can do with A.S.S. Alien spaceship simulator.

I'm normally not one to make fun of other peoples ideas, but if you would initially take the time to first build a 2dof sim (certainly achievable for a reasonably cheap budget) and get it working, then you may understand some of the feedback you are receiving. For me these 3DOF 'ball sims' seem like a very expensive way to build something that for most of its use performs no better (likely worse) than a standard 2DOF balanced frame with drift.