Having somewhere like that to escape to has been hella palliative over the past two years.
But because I play Elite in VR, it feels less like a game and more like an actual place where I can go and spend time. You spend a lot of time doing mundane things-docking, undocking, ferrying cargo from point A to point B, working out profitable trade routes, gathering minerals, engineering your ship(s), that kind of stuff.
#FLIGHT SIM COCKPIT SIMULATOR#
Elite is kind of an odd game where there’s not much game to it-it’s more like a you-are-flying-a-spaceship simulator than it is a traditional space combat sim or anything like that.
There are associative memories galore-mostly from Elite: Dangerous, which is what I’m usually playing ( DCS is a distant second, because I am all about that space). So tell me, what was going on in your life when you got it? So often when I make a big purchase or find a new song or play a new game it always gets mixed in with these associative memories, so I can never think about the one thing without thinking about whatever was going on the first time I found it. The cockpit takes up a lot of room, but it’s comfortable and puts you in a more “natural” reclined position for piloting and driving, and it’s really nice to have the controls for your plane or car or whatever be where they’re “supposed” to be. A cockpit also allows for easy swaps, so you can change your physical control setup from airplane to helicopter to car to Elite: Dangerous spaceship just by moving a few bits around. It gives you options on where to mount stuff and what you can mount-you can configure a side-stick setup if you’re flying an aircraft that has its flight controls set up that way IRL (like an F-16, for example), or center stick if you’re flying an aircraft with center controls (like most other fighters). There are all kinds of awesome clampy-type things that will let you mount joysticks and throttles to a normal desk, and they work really well.īut a cockpit setup can be a lot more comfortable if you’re planning on multi-hour gaming sessions. There’s nothing wrong with playing flying/driving sims seated at a desk. Tell me, a person who knows nothing about any flight-sim anything, why this is cool and why I would want one. I was in a mood, and I bought it because my purchasing discipline is basically zero. Was it an impulse purchase, or one of those things you had been thinking about for a long time?Ī little bit of both, I guess-I’d been thinking for years that I should get one, but the actual buying process was pretty impulsive. It gives me a place to sit and mount peripherals (like joysticks, throttles, wheels, pedals, keyboard, mouse, monitors) in a way that’s conducive to flying or driving.
#FLIGHT SIM COCKPIT PC#
It forms the base around which my gaming PC setup is built. I think it’d be the Obutto R3volution cockpit. What’s the thing on your desk/part of your setup/etc that you want to tell me about?
Now that he's back around the Orbital HQ, Ars Senior Technology Reporter Andrew Cunningham is interviewing Ars staffers about the gadgets they use to put the "home" into "home office," starting with Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson and his intricate flight-sim setup. One of the great things about working from home is that you have a lot of freedom to set your home office up just the way you like it, whether you're perfecting your PC setup to make it more comfortable for long days of Zoom meetings or buying weird niche gaming accessories for after-hours fun.