Question.


Flight sim could be a place to test ideas.  Where are the dreamers?
The real aviation world is full of visionaries who devote years, if not lifetimes to making their aircraft concepts real, Burt Rutan, and Jim Bede being great personal favourites as examples of people who changed our notion of what is possible.  The annual pilgrimage to Oshkosh and other showcase air-shows around the world is testimony to the imagination.
In the flying model aircraft community, you can pick up magazines from any decade and see hundreds of aircraft that have no real world equivalent.  As a kid, my aircraft modeling buddies and I designed and built all kinds of our-own-design concept aircraft, using balsa wood, or foam, and we also crashed and destroyed way too many of these.  The price of a crash was incredibly high when considering the long hours put into building, and yet we did build them.
As an environment to dream and test aircraft concepts, it would seem to me that these flight simulation games are a wonderful vehicle.  The leaning curve for the modeling software, painting programs, texture mapping, and creating a custom flight dynamics file, may be long, but a modification is easy, a repaint is easier, where crashes just means reloading the aircraft – no broken bit to carry home.  A new idea can be made as easy as changing a few numbers in a file and you are away to the virtually races.  
Scanning these flight sim web sites and forums, one finds an incredible array of aircraft, a virtual aviation museum of anything that was flown or even shown on design drawing during the past in any war or by any larger aviation manufacturer, yet the homebuilt designs are under represented, and the concepts that people could dream up (with few exceptions) aren’t there!  It seems very few flight simmer are willing to run with something (to fly it) unless it was validated by some previous government or corporation.  Again, this seems at odds with the free spirit of the internet, where anything is possible and “more power to dreamer”.   So where are the dreamer?

Harold
www.dickert.ca/swift

A concept airplane (my own, pictured below ) got me started on using FSDS designing objects for flight simulation. After a couple of reworkings, and with a lot of help from the FS design community, the aircraft can be flown complete with "authentic" Air Force repaints. Funny thing is, although I have a fair number of real-life favourites at hand (incl. A343 & DHC-4 Caribou) this one remains my favourite and is flown almost exclusively. You never know what sort of interest your idea may hold for others, but it's satisfying to see it take flight even if only in a virtual sense. Harold's Swift looks quite interesting, going to have to check it out as well.