Beech 2000 Starship "Coming Soon"!

You are certainly correct. Little more than a largely uneducated pipe dream on my part!

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Even “Cooler” if you could get the Registration NCC1701

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Most definitely :smiley:
There even was a company which used to own them called “Starship Enterprises”

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From my understanding, the Beech Starship was terrible in about every way it could be. To the point that Beech supposedly held off on upgrading the King Air 300 to keep it performing worse than Starship to not hurt sales. The development process was continually hampered by Scaled Composites not being able to take criticism, it stalled like a falling plate, never made it’s design performance numbers, was vastly overbuilt because Beech didn’t stand up to the FAA, a systems catastrophe, and so much of a liability that Beech had to buy them back and destroy them.

On the other hand, it’s a cool looking airplane and it can’t be that bad in a sim.

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I fly the Fenix Airbus with no graphics card in my computer with no FPS issues at all. With ultra high quality cockpit textures + EXTRA high quality cockpit (for a lot of VRAM) choosen of course to max out the eye candy…
My fear of FPS issues is rather low to zero :wink:
Sooner or later I am going to buy a graphics card, the Gigabyte Radeon 6600 Eagle should fit best for flying like the name says.

Don´t fear the glass - embrace it and write the developer a mail to make the glass reflections in even higher quality and higher resolution.

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Agreed, glass only causes problems these days when XML gauges are being rendered outside of dev mode (which uses nanovg which is much faster.) Thankfully, nanovg is now available in SU10 beta as an experimental feature, so soon even that problem will go away. Equally unworried about all the glass.

That may be someone’s take…but if you read more of the articles out there, that’s probably not the prevailing opinion of those who dealt with this program personally at Beech or Scaled Composites. The entire development had an extremely aggressive timeline from the outset. They were forced to build the full scale prototypes almost simultaneously with the Rutan proof-of-concept aircraft (which as a result ended up being a marketing stunt) as opposed to incorporating lessons learned from the concept aircraft. It’s pretty hard to pin that against Scaled since it seems like they weren’t allowed to flesh out the concept at all really. Engineers asked for more time to work on systems but commercial pressures from Raytheon meant that the first production aircraft were rushed out when they were technically immature.

The program was horribly complex and expensive, yes, and of course that was passed on with a unit price that was not competitive in the end. But, there was also the challenge of selling a bleeding edge design to a market that tends to be fairly conservative. You could say that they were not replacing the King Air so much as competing with light jets like the Citations. The best qualities of the Starship were probably not borne out because of pressure from executives. Remember, that the Starship program happened at the same time that Beechcraft was transitioning to Raytheon ownership, so there definitely was some turbulence from that cultural shift happening at the same time.

If you’re really interested in this, I suggest the 2004 article from Air & Space linked below (forum hyperlink button is not working tonight)

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Ya know, I could not agree more with your post if I tried. Back in the early 1980’s, as a young man I worked for Beech (Beechcraft West at Hayward California, KHWD). And yes, they tried too hard and pushed Scaled Composites too hard. It was a wonderful group of people at Scaled. I would go over to visit them at Mojave from time to time. Wonderful people, under enormous pressure. They had a class A design. Problem was… well, a lot of things. Certification by the FAA who had never done any thing similar before, selling it to the board, selling it to the public… in the end it ended up competing not against the primary competition, being the Piper Cheyenne 400 LS, a SCREAMING fast turboprop marketed by none other than Chuck Yeager himself, and a jet, the Cessna Citation. A jet, but a slow jet… The completion actually liked the Citation. We were able to market our turbo props as having “Near Jet Speed!”. Well, the Citation was the “near jet” we were referring to! The rest of us somewhat chuckled at all the problems that Citations had. Especially the bird strikes. Bird strikes on the trailing edge of the wings…But in reality, the primary competition to the Starship was the King Air B200, and later the B300. We were competing against ourselves, and that could not continue. A house divided can not stand, so they did what they had to do… sadly.

I am very fortunate to have lived through those days. The 80% scaled mockup was not really intended as an engineering mockup. It was a marketing mockup. They were able to announce the new design, and then magically, the “real aircraft” flew by! Not an artist drawing, but by all appearances the real thing. That sold a lot of initial slots. Today, I am blessed to work for a company that does something similar, but we have taken it to the next level! We announce a new aircraft, and then suddenly that aircraft does not fly overhead, out of reach, but the real aircraft, full, real, 100% actual, taxis up, parks, and you can walk around it and touch it. It may not have flown yet, but it is REAL. I thank God every day for allowing me to live this dream. But, back to the Starship. WONDERFUL aircraft, and I am sooooo looking forward to being able to fly it in MSFS. It is going to be great. I just know it will!

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They are not all gone.

As far as I know NC-50 and NC-33 are still flying out of Addison and another 3 or 4 airworthy examples are kicking about.

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Cool video. Regardless of her real-world problems, that is an aircraft that is built to capture the imagination in a wonderful way.

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How do you use the sim with no graphics card? I have a good graphics card and my sim is still stuttery, crashes, and not the best FPS consistently.

That’s a really good question :laughing: maybe a pretty solid integrated GPU?

Yeah, I imagine what he really meant is he’s using the onboard motherboard graphics card, which, aren’t really too bad these days. That’s how I interpreted it anyway.

Very true, I was able to use my built-in AMD graphics for several months until I could find a GTX 1650 for a semi-reasonable price.

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On-board graphics chip are in fact very very good, and I have bought the Radeon 5700 OC only to enjoy the Flight Simulator in maximum quality.
Oh and Guardians of the Galaxy nicely asks for a graphics card and returns to desktop, fully ignoring the Ryzen-APU.

All other games run flawless with the on-board chip only (but this does not mean that the flight simulator is “baaaadly optimized” and “I want it to run on my Intel Pentium 3 with Riva TNT 2 16MB RAM system mimimimimimimi…:smiley: )
But the Flight Sim 20 has excessive modding, the on-board chip cannot handle these big high-quality addon-airports very well, and I want to run it in a modded-ultra-setting with double the house and tree rendering distance and in 2580x1440 to have super-sharp texture and visual quality to read these small Airbus screens even when zoomed back.

When the resolution is too low these cathode screens which are also implemented in the Starship cockpit show only blurry fuzzy numbers for airspeed and altitude and these numbers cannot be read anymore after a ceratain zoom level.
That´s why having immense rendering power to run a high resolution is very important to fly the sim.

Any word if this is still happening? My wallet is barking at me.

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My guess is it’s still too early in systems development to really show anything. The AMS-850 flight suite is definitely not a simple one, and Black Square have proven themselves to not skip out on detail. The steam gauge King Air hasn’t even released yet.

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Ditto, I am with you.

Any update on this? The “coming soon” teaser was quite a while ago

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Too bad they scraped the Starship due to a Rumor of one coming out soon soon? what year?, that was over a year ago, and I see No Progress at all.
Hope they can recover the Delleted starship and Finish what they originaly had planed started.
this is a lesson to not let others tell you you cant do it, Do it anyway.