Thanks
TL;DR - Thanks for the work guys - I'd love to see more!
Thanks for both of the FT planes in this thread. I fully appreciate the level of effort required, having done this myself in the past. I am a little disappointed to learn that RealFlight has abandoned this aspect of the hobby.
A few years back (2011?) I was just getting into scratchbuilding using hotwire foam cutting and building several variants of FoamFlyer's planes (example:
http://www.foamflyer.info/plane.html). I wanted to model a bunch of different variants to see how changing various electronics affected the flight characteristics (using VPX A123 cells instead of lipos, using bigger/smaller props, changing prop pitch/diameter, etc). Long story short, I built three different variants of FoamFlyer's plane using different combinations that I had modeled in RF and they each flew pretty much exactly as RF predicted. I did the modeling back in RF 4 and, unfortunately, I am unable to export those to the latest version that I have installed (7.5).
I recently re-entered the hobby and was hoping to repeat/duplicate my efforts using the FT designs and the newest version of RF (7.5) Alas, I no longer have 3DS installed and from the sounds of things the KEX plugin being incompatible with the versions of 3DS I now have access to is going to be a huge roadblock to getting back into modelling planes in RF. On the bright side, I'm in a much better place financially than I was back then, so I can afford to spend the money needed to build/crash my own designs now vs trying to save money by investing massive amounts of time on accurately modeling them in the simulator beforehand. Sounds like it is likely to be pretty much a wash in terms of total time invested. But overall I think it is a bit of a loss for the community and the hobby as a whole.