Design a Week #1 - Flight Simulator

This is my first stab at doing a quickie Design a Week attraction. I set a due date of each Wed but only had 2 days this first time so I did something purely technical. Let me state for the record that it is a complete coincidence that I chose to start with a simulator ride during the same week that Star Tours closed. For reals. I kind of forgot about that. Weird.

My goal was to try and create a flight simulator that functioned differently from any I’ve personally seen before. I wanted this to move more like an actual aircraft and be more physically thrilling. Instead of an X / Y tilt axis, this simulator has front tilt and 360 degree horizontal roll. Small-scale simulator inversions have been done before but I went for a large scale. This vehicle seats 64. When you look at this, it will be obvious that I’m not an engineer. This is intended to be just a concept mock-up. For example, I realize that the entire vehicle will slide off the tires on tilt but the guide and support assemblies should be assumed.

In the case of a simulator, just about any story will work. However, since this vehicle is capable of inversions and there is no gravity in space, I think a space travel theme would be inappropriate (sorry Star Tours). I thought it would be kind of cool if the theme was simply joy-riding. Maybe while waiting in the load area, the riders could vote on the experiences and locations they are heading to (again, this has been done on a small scale). I placed screens on the ceiling and side walls because I think the barrel rolls would be enhanced by seeing the ground above the riders. Of course, cleaning puke off the ceiling screens might suck a bit too.

That’s week #1. Now I’ll start on something story-oriented and a bit more complicated for week #2.