A famous rocket plane for FlightGear 1.0.

North American X-15
X15.jpg
Type Rocket-powered aircraft
Author(s) Mike Hill, Jon S. Berndt (FDM), John Check
FDM JSBSim
--aircraft= X15, X15-new
Status Unknown
Supports Space trip
Download Download the North American X-15 aircraft package for the current stable release (2020.3).

Of the two out three surviving X-15, one is a the National Air and Space Museum

Development status/Issues/Todo

Outside:

  • textures are bumpy
  • flaps are not animated
  • rudder, ailerons and pitch elevator are not animated
  • cockpit windows are not transparent
  • aircraft has no shadow
  • no aircraft light available
  • there is no stream behind the rocket engine visible

3d Cockpit:

  • no 3d cockpit available

General:

  • engines have no sound
  • no hud available
  • aircraft has no braking parachutes

Ballistic high altitude flight and rendering

Flightgear is able to render the scene for the ballistic high altitude flight the X-15 is capable of (at least on a modern graphics card), but it needs some special adjustments to do so. Assume the visibility at arc top should be 500 km:

  • from the menu, LOD bare range needs to be set to 500000.0
  • in the property browser, /sim/rendering/camera-group/zfar needs to be set to 500000.0
  • in the weather menu, configure visibility at high altitude to 500000.0 m
  • use the Atmospheric Light Scattering framework to get the correct visuals of being outside the atmosphere in the rendering menu