Weapon System Integration for the AFIT Virtual Cockpit

The Air Force Institute of Technology is continuing research in the Virtual Cockpit. The Virtual Cockpit makes use of high performance graphics workstations, Virtual Environment technology, and Distributed Interactive Simulation network protocols to create a flight simulator based on the capabilities of the McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle. The work presented in this thesis focuses on the design and implementation issues for integrating a weapons delivery capability. Weapons simulated include RADAR and IR guided air- to-air missiles, gravity and precision guided bombs, and a 20mm cannon. Virtual Environment displays used include color NTSC and monochrome high resolution helmet mounted displays employing a Polhemus Fastrack sensor, and a display using five separate BARCO projectors simultaneously. The Target graphics system was a four processor, SGI Onyx workstation with a Reality Engine graphics pipeline. Graphics rendering was accomplished with an AFIT developed object oriented simulation software package based on the SGI Performer 1.2 application development environment.