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Find your way into flight simulator cockpit construction

6.11 Motion system

The sense of motion is generated by the G-force resulting from a combination of movement and the position of an aircraft. This sense of motion in many cases does not directly correspond to the position of the flight controls. Compared to for instance the generation of vibration in a flight simulator cockpit environment, it is much harder to generate a sophisticated movement experience.

The ultimate motion system knows what is called 6 degrees of freedom (6 dof):

The rotational movements around the X-axis and Y-axis (bank and pitch) are the most important to generate a moving effect. For a quick more detailed introduction see: Moorabbin Flying Services.

A unique low price do-it-your-self motion platform is the JoyRider (acesim). They offer detailed construction drawings, a construction guide containing step-by-step directions covering every detail of each assembly operation and a complete parts lists and sources. Although driven by stick position, this platform may be a basis for a motorized version. A similar approach is followed by Flight Control Simulator. A bit more advanced platform is the SimCraft (SimCraft). Documentation on the predecessor of SimCraft is available on (SourceForge).

An unique supplier is Classic Flight. They offer MBE boards to control the motion platform and the Motion Drive software to drive the boards. Basically all you need for building your own motion platform without getting into all the programming details. A range of motion platform configurations is supported.

Examples of ready made motion platforms with 2, 3 or 5 axis that can serve as a basis for a flight simulator cockpit are  Full Motion Platform (SimWare), FasTrac (Real Sims), Motion platforms (InMotion Simulation) and 301 LFS (Force Dynamics). A new approach on motion can be found on MORSIM.

Home based examples including documentation are Lurker, FMFSP and ClassicSim.

In the supplier section you will find more examples.