And now imagine, the plane spiraling fiercely, the sky swirling around, centrifugal forces pulling your body against the belts, and a red, flashing light urging you to encapsulate and eject… the escape capsule as a small lifeboat ready to be splashed in the ocean. I tried to give you an idea on my video, but it is so tidy and efficent, no arms caught in the shells, no fingers trapped in the clutch, but still dramatic in my opinion…
16 Likes
I could swear you are a magician! That is an awsome simulation of an encapsulation!
3 Likes
I wish you all the success, thank you for tackling this rare beast of a plane.
It’s so freakin hard to believe this plane released the same year as my 1964 Impala.
Tech totally ahead of it’s time.
2 Likes
Yees…! I think that if the N2 had survived, it would have become a fantastic plane to test and develop, even if the funding for this project was stopped. I often dream of the “passenger” version of the XB70, a dream flight for the passengers but… how much would cost a ticket for a trip on this plane ? Probably like going in space with a Dragon or a Spaceship today!
1 Like
And now with a little sound too.
8 Likes
Well said.
My thoughts too.
3 Likes
My previous experience was not so easy, they required continuous modifications and additions, but gave very little support, and times got much longer. I could not post images without their consent, and so on. But anyway, if someone were really interested in my XB70 I am open to listen! For the moment only generic “appreciation” and “possible” interest but nothing more.
I admit, for the last days I’ve been playing with emotions, here a rendering of Al White with his wounded arm just cleared from clamahells and the capsule only partially closed, finally ready to eject even with the clamshells still open…
Now back to developing the flight model, plane is still far from reaching Mach 3, even increasing power to the huge values of real XB70 : 28000 lbf with afterburner PER engine, that means x 6!!! Huge!
4 Likes
From one developer to another… This is absolutely incredible ! well done.
6 Likes
Thanks, really appreciated! You are developing great projects, and some delicious ultra-light planes, keep on creating your planes, I see you have a great passion, is something that we share!
Massimo
4 Likes
It seems a great project! If you don’t fimd proper data, which is understandable, try to pick at least details from similar aircraft, like concorde for the aerodynamics (pretty similar) and blackbird for power plant. Won’t be study level but don’t think in this aircraft that would be necessary. For me is ok if the sensation is close enough.
Keep the good work!
2 Likes
A little update, the door opening sequence.
But the really big news is that with the help of another engineer the flight model has been greatly improved. Now the major issues with speed and stability at high altitude are 95% solved, the
plane can finally reach MACH 3,15 and fly over 70.000 fts! A big step forward, now the Valkyrie is riding again in the sky.
16 Likes
Awesome news!! Instant classic in MSFS! Thank you for all your hard work.
1 Like
You are under no obligation to share, but just because I’m curious by nature, what was preventing this?
Awesome news! 
3 Likes
There are some hundreds of parameters in flight_model.cfg, engines.cfg and systems.cfg etc., and they are almost all oriented to subsonic flight. Even setting the thrust to 2 times the actual XB70 value the plane didn’t get faster than M 1.3 or so. The flight controls lost effectiveness and the plane was unstable, and besides, the simulator crashes if some parameters cause errors in calculations, who knows what.
But with the help of Marco (very brilliant in finding the right things to fix) we achieved a good overall behavior, even if we had to “fake” some values, eg. increasing the “thrust scalar” to 5.0, for the moment, but we will work to tweak other parameters in order to bring it back to (ideally) 1.0 - seems hard, probably the flight model of the simulator is not so accurate for this kind of speeds, or the phisic is more complicated and requires more and more fixing… but the essential goal of reproducing the flight envelope of this extraordinary machine seems nearer now.
7 Likes
You are on the way to something special here, you are not only putting your skills into this aircraft but also taking help from others in the community.
Have you considered making it open-source like the FBW plane? It would help if in the future you get tired or busy to let others continue the work and keep adding things to the plane.
Are we close to a Beta release? I would love to test this incredible plane.
3 Likes
Yeah this could be a good idea, I really still don’t know what will be the future of this plane, probably it’s something appreciated only by expert people who know and appreciate the story of X Planes and the insane technology advancement they carried with their development.
If you really like to test it I will share it with you (of course under non disclosure agreement at least for the moment) I’ll surely need beta testers, when the project will be at a reasonable level.
I really appreciate your support, I need to understand if there are really people interested in this project, it takes a lot of work and time, but I hope it will fill an important space in aviation history simulation.
Flying this plane is something difficult to compare with any other plane, included the Blackbird for many reasons, and the Concorde too (even if I love it absolutely).
4 Likes
I have about 100 pics of this thing over the years… Me and a buddy make a yearly pilgrimage to the museum… If theres anything needed, let me know- I might have it.
5 Likes
Massimo, this looks spectacular! I’m super-excited to fly it. Such an amazing era of flying. I kept hoping for a “what-if” cold war sim when I was writing about flight sims for CGW in the 1990s, the heyday of flight simulation. Imagine a modern flight sim with Century Series fighters, B-70s, Crusader IIIs and F-107s, sharing the skies with B-36s, Bears, B-47s, etc…
I love the idea of donationware because there seem to be a lot of MSFS fliers who are less familiar with some of the amazing historic aircraft out there or don’t see why “military” planes belong in a non-combat sim, and it’d be fun to try to get them engaged with an amazing plane like this. There’s certainly a lot there to entice the performance fiends or the systems management fans.
But if you can make some decent money off this, awesome, go for it! I’m going to give you some money whatever method you choose, as I’m super-excited about this and would love to support its continued development.
One idea might be to consider a Patreon? You could post insider updates like you’ve posted here for supporters, allow early access to test updates, and other benefits for supporters.
2 Likes