[Front Office] Getting Real, Or Plans for Building a Cockpit
One of the reasons I want to move forward with actually building the front office is convenience. Right now, I need to do some laborious setup for every practice session. Mount the joystick, throttle and mouse console on my desk--two clamps each for a total of six--position the rudder pedals, reposition the monitor, and plug everything in. I can't leave them up because it makes using the keyboard impossible and pushes the chair too far back from the monitor (something that doesn't matter in VR).
I plan to build the framework of the front office out of 80/20 aluminium modular beams, but I'm having trouble nailing down the lengths I need. Since 80/20 beams are sold by the inch, overestimating what I need will cost money. The trouble is there are two design constraints I can currently only roughly estimate: the size of the ejection seat and how big is too big to mount on the DOF Reality motion platform, should I ever save up the money to buy one. I'd also like to be able to incorporate the Bergison seat.
I do have some references amd inspiration courtest of some existing F-14 cockpit projects at the DCS forums:
Bergison cites a width of 20.8" for his chair, and elsewhere mentions needing 1" of clearance to either side to account for its motion; I'm not sure if that clearance is included in the 20.8" or not, but either way it would fit in the 23" width of the upper left diagram. The real question is the length. How much space do I need from the back of the chair to the foot pedals?
After a lot of thinking and trying to model the answer in my head, I've come to the conclusion that the only way to find out is to build the ejection seat first, and then see firsthand. I can't use my office chair because it sits at the wrong angle--as you can see from the upper right diagram, an ejection seat sits at a very different angle, and the rudder pedals (and thus the pilot's feet) sit pretty high. The pilot is almost reclining.
Based on the upper right diagram, I may be looking at a length of up to 4 feet, which might be too unweildy to mount on the DOF Reality platform. There's also the platform's 330lb weight limit to consider; my own weight tends to hover around 250lbs, meaning the entire cockpit would need to come in under 80 lbs.
I plan to build the framework of the front office out of 80/20 aluminium modular beams, but I'm having trouble nailing down the lengths I need. Since 80/20 beams are sold by the inch, overestimating what I need will cost money. The trouble is there are two design constraints I can currently only roughly estimate: the size of the ejection seat and how big is too big to mount on the DOF Reality motion platform, should I ever save up the money to buy one. I'd also like to be able to incorporate the Bergison seat.
I do have some references amd inspiration courtest of some existing F-14 cockpit projects at the DCS forums:
Bergison cites a width of 20.8" for his chair, and elsewhere mentions needing 1" of clearance to either side to account for its motion; I'm not sure if that clearance is included in the 20.8" or not, but either way it would fit in the 23" width of the upper left diagram. The real question is the length. How much space do I need from the back of the chair to the foot pedals?
After a lot of thinking and trying to model the answer in my head, I've come to the conclusion that the only way to find out is to build the ejection seat first, and then see firsthand. I can't use my office chair because it sits at the wrong angle--as you can see from the upper right diagram, an ejection seat sits at a very different angle, and the rudder pedals (and thus the pilot's feet) sit pretty high. The pilot is almost reclining.
Based on the upper right diagram, I may be looking at a length of up to 4 feet, which might be too unweildy to mount on the DOF Reality platform. There's also the platform's 330lb weight limit to consider; my own weight tends to hover around 250lbs, meaning the entire cockpit would need to come in under 80 lbs.