BATTLESTAR GALACTICA Viper Flight Simulator Being Built by High School Students
A team of five high school students from the Bay Area banded together to create a flight simulator and cockpit of Battlestar Galactica's Viper. This project was funded by a Kickstarter campaign that they launched. The got the money they were looking for, and they are constructing it for the 2012 Maker Faire. Here are some details on the awesome project,
The basic idea is to mount the fuselage of a small plane (a Piper PA-28) on a motion control platform that is capable of 360 degree rotation on both the pitch and roll axes. The video shows the basic design we're shooting for. This design allows for considerably more motion around the pitch axis than commercial entertainment systems, such as those found at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum [...]
We found the Piper fuselage in an airplane scrap yard, cut it to fit the proposed frame, and installed a racing seat with six-point harness. We used Autodesk Inventor software to design the frame, acquired the steel to build it with, and sent the steel to a local fabricator for professional welding.
It's still in development, but you can follow the progress being made on their official site. It will be cool to see this thing completed and in full working condition. I was never very good at buildng things. I tried building models at one point in my life, but they always turned out looking like shit. Check out the video, and let us know what the hardest thing you've ever built was.