Glad and excited to be getting back into flight simming! I was mainly into Falcon4, but plan on also getting into DCS A-10C.
As stated in the other thread, my wife is letting me have the guest room to change into a man cave.
So I starting ticking off things I always wanted, and things that were a problem in my previous pursuits. Because of limited space, before I had to be able to put a cockpit area for desktop and simming use, and ended up with a situation with a keyboard tray bolted on the side of the ABC pit, and turned my monitor in that direction when I wasn't flying. Now, in our office we have a large desk that would be a perfect location for FPS and non-simming gaming. So I figure that when I want to do something other than fly, I'll drag the PC into the office and hook it up to the monitor in there (which currently houses the Mac Mini we both use).
I've used the Akers-Barnes plans before and felt comfortable with that, but wanted to add a few modifications of my own, and some inspired by posts in this forum.
- A wider keyboard tray to allow for a CH Throttle Quadrant, keyboard, and mouse. The TQ will mainly be used for the switches on the face and also for a landing gear handle and anything else that strikes me.
- A rudder pedal mount.
- A forward tilt for the joystick.
- Cougar MFDs with screens behind them to make active MFDs. This Holy Grail wasn't feasible when I was last in flying.
Some construction photos:
Don't have any current photos of it, but I've built an add-on to the dash for mounting the Cougar MFDs, USB monitors, and an X-Keys 58 for an ICP. Photos of that will come. I used to have an Aimsworth F-16 ICP/MFDs, but that was lost long ago.
Some equipment for the project:
HOTAS Warthog, X-Keys 58, X-Keys 20, Cougar MFDs, and two Lilliput UM-80 USB monitors.
Old
HOTAS equipment. I'll be using the CH Pro Pedals and will use the Cougar throttle when flying Falcon4. Ghost will recognize the Franken-Potato(TM).
And some new equipment, for simming and other uses: TrackIR 5, G13 game board, G700 wireless mouse, Func Surface1030, and
Logitech k360 wireless keyboard. I chose that keyboard because it's compact and wireless, and I would be using the G13 in FPS games anyway. I also picked up two Satechi 12-port inline USB hubs that will be mounted in the cockpit.
As for the computer all this will be hooked up to, that's on order and will be here in a few weeks. Since I've been out of PC gaming for quite a while, I decided to take the easy (but
expensive) route of ordering a Mach V from Falcon Northwest. It'll have a Core i7 3930K @3.2GHz, a 1200W PSU, liquid cooling (which I really wanted but didn't want to mess with), 32GB 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, a BD burner, a 256GB SSD (I'll add additional storage drives later), and an EVGA GeForce GTX680 2GB card. I went with just one card for now due to cost, but the motherboard will support two cards in SLI, so I can always add one later.
Well that was a lot for one post, but as you can tell, I'm excited and happy to be diving back down in this rabbit hole!