Question Virtual Airline dedicated for Orbiter VSA's

[IronRain]

Hello everyone,

I'm sure you've all heard of a Virtual Airline, or VA for short.
Most people fly with an VA to add some more realism to simulators like Flight Simulator and/or X-plane.

Some people are also using these simulators to add more realism to their Orbiter missions (at least I do). So I was wondering of anybody would be interested in a Virtual Airline, dedicated to Orbiter!

My plan is as follows:

• A website for the VA itself (something like obiterva.com/.net)
• Within that website (which will be using phpvms) define airlines for the various VSA's
• Add flightplans, ranks, economics, aircrafts, etc... just like any other VA out on the World Wide Web

By installing a small program that records your flight, and uploads the results the webserver, you'll get virtual money which you can use in your VSA operations (I know some people have some excel sheets and calculate the costs of their virtual space program).

I'm not aiming to be a big VA, this is just internally for O-F members to add some more realism to their VSA. I will only put effort in it when there are enough members willing to join the VA. You are not required to fly online or to fly at least one mission every month, again this is just for fun.

This can also lead to some interaction between different VSA's, like VSA 1 flying a cargo mission (satellite to launch site) for VSA 2.

Please let me know if there is any interested in this, as well as other things you would like to see or add to the plan.

 

[TMac3000]

This would be KILLER for RTI if I ever reopen it:thumbup: That way, we could fly to Kazakhstan if we want to use a Proton or Energia

 

[Urwumpe]

I still would love to do some Seach&Rescue - VA or so around Orbiter... just because of the fact that we are easily capable of landing everywhere on Earth except the runway.

 

[SolarLiner]

The biggest problem any "multiplayer" VSA is going to get is how to share the Universe of the VSA across all players. What I think would be the most useful is an app that syncs a VSA Universe to your local machine then run it (and "lock" the server file so that only one person can have access at a time), then check for objectives and etc. It would also take care of the scenario manipulation by allowing the user to spawn vessels and attachments (at the cost of some of that money), kind of what my idea was behind "Orbiter Space Program", my crappy little program that was supposed to make those type of simulations easier to setup. :lol: (well, to be fair it did what it was supposed to, but my coding technique was rather "childish" and full of bugs, and I was coding in VB.NET at the time ... yeah)

 

[Mojave]

The biggest problem any "multiplayer" VSA is going to get is how to share the Universe of the VSA across all players. What I think would be the most useful is an app that syncs a VSA Universe to your local machine then run it (and "lock" the server file so that only one person can have access at a time), then check for objectives and etc. It would also take care of the scenario manipulation by allowing the user to spawn vessels and attachments (at the cost of some of that money), kind of what my idea was behind "Orbiter Space Program", my crappy little program that was supposed to make those type of simulations easier to setup. :lol: (well, to be fair it did what it was supposed to, but my coding technique was rather "childish" and full of bugs, and I was coding in VB.NET at the time ... yeah)

In regards to Urwumpe's post (1), this might be a bit difficult. Unless you make one member some sort of NTSB inspector. Then he can be in charge of the orbiter universe until the inspection is complete.

Otherwise, we could just do what I do with a VA for my VSA, just launch FSX. There are many, many addons that we could use for cargo planes and stuff like that. Orbiter is a no factor here, it's just point A to B flying. And since we'd be using FSX, we can just bind the VA to O-F's FSX server.


References:
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(1)

I still would love to do some Seach&Rescue - VA or so around Orbiter... just because of the fact that we are easily capable of landing everywhere on Earth except the runway.

 

[IronRain]

I think I need to add some details about my first post.
I was talking about opening a VA for Orbiter to use in a simulator like FSX or X-Plane.
It is still possible to use the VA website for flights within Orbiter, but there is no program to upload the results to the webserver. You could still file a pirep (pilot report) manually of course.

It's just for airplanes, at least at first. Maybe I/we can expand it later to include orbital flights.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough.

 

[Urwumpe]

In regards to Urwumpe's post (1), this might be a bit difficult. Unless you make one member some sort of NTSB inspector. Then he can be in charge of the orbiter universe until the inspection is complete.

Not really. SAR is not a crash investigation, but rather just about finding the ejected people or their crash site as fast as possible, often with minimal knowledge about the place. Its about saving lives now and not in the future.

Since CSAR missions are a reality in DCS, why should it be exactly hard to make civilian SAR missions in FSX or in Orbiter?

 

[IronRain]

Not really. SAR is not a crash investigation, but rather just about finding the ejected people or their crash site as fast as possible, often with minimal knowledge about the place. Its about saving lives now and not in the future.

Since CSAR missions are a reality in DCS, why should it be exactly hard to make civilian SAR missions in FSX or in Orbiter?

I think this would be very easy. And we can easily create a specific download section for these mission.

 

[Mojave]

Not really. SAR is not a crash investigation, but rather just about finding the ejected people or their crash site as fast as possible, often with minimal knowledge about the place. Its about saving lives now and not in the future.

Since CSAR missions are a reality in DCS, why should it be exactly hard to make civilian SAR missions in FSX or in Orbiter?

Thanks for the information, I always thought NTSB handled SAR.

I didn't mean it'd be hard from a performance standpoint, I was more speaking towards SolarLiner's comment on sharing the Orbiter universe (the multiplayer idea.)

Doing SAR in Orbiter is fine, but it'd have to be done outside of a multiplayer client.

 

[Urwumpe]

Thanks for the information, I always thought NTSB handled SAR.

No, it is done by the coast guard for example - or equivalent organisations in other countries. Especially famous is the German DGzRS there.

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Maritime_Search_and_Rescue_Service"]German Maritime Search and Rescue Service - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

I didn't mean it'd be hard from a performance standpoint, I was more speaking towards SolarLiner's comment on sharing the Orbiter universe (the multiplayer idea.)

Well, I am not sure what we can use in FSX there, would need more research. But I am pretty sure, at least using a simple single action MFD in Orbiter for creating a small text file that contains every information needed to produce the SAR mission in FSX would be possible.

If you are really insane, you would create a C# application that uses data from Orbiter for producing an automatic PDF mission briefing.

Doing SAR in Orbiter is fine, but it'd have to be done outside of a multiplayer client.

Of course - I doubt it would work well there.

But then... making a tool kit for adding SAR stations to a Orbiter scenario would be possible.

 

[garyw]

But then... making a tool kit for adding SAR stations to a Orbiter scenario would be possible.

You already have it all. ISA does SAR missions and test runs before many launches and always has a ship 150 miles off the coast in case of an abort.

 

[IronRain]

I've quickly build something to show a bit what I mean:

http://orbiterva.dmweijers.nl/index.php/

Again, the idea is to use FSX(/X-Plane/FS9) to fly missions in benefit of your Orbiter missions.
As you can see, I've "flown" one mission already, from EHAM to KJFK. This was a flightplan created for MSA. In this case, another VSA (like HASSESA from Samuel Edwards) could have flown this flight in an agreement to reduce launch costs for their next mission, launched by MSA.

So that's basically the idea, just to give your FS flight some more purpose.

 

[mojoey]

Skin up some MilViz T-38s and a PMDG T7, and you have a mobile support command.

 

[garyw]

I've quickly build something to show a bit what I mean:

http://orbiterva.dmweijers.nl/index.php/

I've not done much with this in the past two years but this shows what I set up for ISA -> http://isa.gdwnet.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93&Itemid=79

The concept is the same but it has a bit more detail.

 

[IronRain]

I've not done much with this in the past two years but this shows what I set up for ISA -> http://isa.gdwnet.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=93&Itemid=79



The concept is the same but it has a bit more detail.

It has the same concept indeed. However that looks like it's only for ISA, and I would like to bring all the VSA's together.

 

[garyw]

ISA has this as well.
http://isa.gdwnet.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=128&Itemid=87

We'll fly anything you want. For a fee.

 

[mojoey]

So...the VA would act as a contractor of sorts?

 

[IronRain]

The VA is a place to bring VSA's together, to cooperate with each other. You can see it as a mediator. At least that's how I envisioned it. VSA 1 has a flight it wants to be flown, mails the details to the VA, the VA uploads it to the site, VSA 2 can fly the mission.

Of course VSA 1 can still fly the mission himself, if he just wants the flight to be tracked online.

 

[IronRain]

ISA has this as well.
http://isa.gdwnet.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=128&Itemid=87

We'll fly anything you want. For a fee.

Wow, haven't seen that page yet. That looks great.

I actually followed your missions closely on your website. I've still bookmarked it. Do you have plans to continue with it?