Modifying Zero Fighter

Dec. 30, 2006

Thanks to Syd Adams, we can use A6M2 - Zero fighter - in FlightGear. Though it's still in its early stage of development process, it is very good to have the first Japanese aircraft in the FlightGear world.

To contribute to this fastinating aircraft, I've been working on both adjusting flight model and making some panel instruments. Inspite of my easy thought, it's a bit hard to adjust the parameters. Making instruments are way beyond my knowledge. So I've been struggling with these things.

After a week of struggles, I managed to make some instruments (tach, rev, speed, pressures, cylinder temp, and oil temp) and installed those to the cockpit. Though these don't look perfect yet, I can feel like I'm in the cockpit of A6M2. After I installed these instruments, I found that A6M2 is updated in the CVS repository. Wow, there're some instruments installed in the cockpit. I modified xml files so my A6M2 has all available instruments. Now its cockpit looks like this.

I've read many articles and books about Zero and tried to emulate its features and characteristics. At this moment, its flight model is getting a bit closer to the real one I guess (I'm not sure at all since I've never tried it of course).

If you are interested, download A6M2b-20061231 and install it. A6M2 is the original one, and A6M2b is the one I modified. A6M2b-green is the repainted version of A6M2b (Yeah, it's just a cheap repaint but don't blame me because I'm not good at using 3d modeling tools). Propeller-pitch is set to 0.7 and boost is set to 0 in A6M2b*.set by default. Pressing 'Ctrl-b' twice and pressing 'Shift-n' three times will make it fly at its full power.

I'll try to integrate mine into his for making everything more consistent.