How to push a Single Seat Cockpit to the limits (customer report)

One of our customers has built a closed single-seater cockpit with a 180° outside view. To give flight simulator enthusiasts some hints for building such a cockpit, we include the description of his construction in our blog. On the other hand, we are interested in learning about a potential demand for prefabricated VIER IM POTT parts for a single seater. Please contact us if you have questions or suggestions.

Design Objectives

• The simulator fits in a small room.
• The simulator can be positioned in a corner of the room in order to save floor space. To provide adequate access for maintenance work, the simulator is relocatable off the walls.
• The simulator can be disassembled. Even the largest part can be fed through a standard size door (73.5 x 198.5 cm).
• 180 degree outside view with 4K TV monitors. TVs have been preferred over projectors/screens as they use less space, have more luminance and a better contrast ratio.

Construction

• Dimension of the simulator: 240 x 170 x 200 cm (width x depth x height).
• The simulator base consists of two 19 mm MDF boards (170 x 120 cm) bolted together. 24 rotating wheels are attached to the bottom of the boards:

To keep the simulator base free from intruding screws, the wheels and struts are glued to the boards. This ensures area-wide 19 mm depth for wood insert nuts.

• All decomposable parts of the simulator are tied together by M bolts and nuts:

Wood screws have only been used for the reinforcement of non-detachable bonds.

The cockpit rack (side stays and roof beams) is built for adequate load bearing and torsion resistance:
   
   

Some VIER IM POTT shell frame parts have been shortened to make the shell frame fit onto the simulator base plate. The overhead panel is suspended to a roof cross-beam in order to obviate positioning restrictions for the monitors.

The asymmetric cockpit is designed to mimic the A320 original as accurately as possible but adapted to the constraints of a single-seater:

• The monitors cover the entire outside view.
• The right hand cockpit window is somewhat smaller than the left one because, from the captain’s seat, the field of vision through the right window is more constricted than through the left window.
• For aesthetic reasons and to better suit requirements for visual flight operations (e.g. right-hand circling approaches), the field of view from the captain’s seat through the right hand side is moderately larger than in the real A320 cockpit.

The cockpit before installation of the monitors and the enclosure:
   





  

All self-made parts except the monitor supports (aluminium profiles) are made of wood, mostly of plywood (6 mm and 4 mm) and square wood strips.

Finished cockpit:
   
   

Monitors

Five Samsung 4k TVs arranged as follows:
   

To cover the wider of the two display bezels, there is a small overlap of the TVs (not shown in the diagram above).

The outside view is defined by a Prepar3D View Group configured according to the monitor setup. Approximate View Frustum Values are:
   
   

The single seater configuration and the floor space restrictions precluded a symmetric arrangement of the monitors. Nevertheless, the visual impression is very appealing and gives a stunning flying experience:
   

Power Supply

• Three-phase power supply (PE+N+L1+L2+L3):
  L1    computers, USB hubs, Ethernet switch
  L2    monitors
  L3    Skalarki panels, audio amplifiers

• L1+L2+L3 are switched on/off by three 12V relays activated by a small rocker switch in the cockpit. There are no high-voltage cables leading to the cockpit. To protect the relays, the in series connection of 16A inrush current limiters is highly recommended as some of the PSUs (Power Supply Units) draw quite a high starting current.

Computer

• Two high-end PCs:
  Intel Core i7 8700K, 6 Core, overclocked to 4.77 GHz
  16 GB DDR4-RAM, 3GHz
  1 TB Samsung 970 EVO SSD
  ASUS Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti, 11GB GDDR5X

• The PCs can be switched on and off remotely from the cockpit.

Software

• Prepar3D Professional Plus  ‖  Skalarki Profiler  ‖  ProSimA320  ‖  FSGlobal Ultimate Next Generation  ‖  ORBX  ‖  Active Sky  ‖  Navigraph Simlink  ‖  Remote Flight Map HD  ‖  Startup Delayer.
• Prepar3D multichannel configuration:
     Monitors  1  &  5  connected to the host computer
     Monitors  2  &  3  &  4  connected to the client computer
     FrameSyncRate=60