Since I am a new designer these notes are meant to help beginners like me, but some experienced designers might get a laugh out of them.
My FSDS files
Gear:
The hellcat's gears twist as they retract into the wing. To model this I made two sets of gears. Both sets are fully extended, with the first set in take off / landing postion. The second set is twisted on the Z axis 90 degrees. Both gears were tagged for AA. I changed the first two gear's axis to Z. The motion sequence was "51-100:+2", this allows the gear to be seen for the last part of the sequence only and doubles the speed which allows for a full 90 degree rotation. However, since AA prerotates everthing I had to set the z axis to 225 degrees to start with. The second gears then pick up with a sequence of "1-50:+2". I let the gears disapear at the end of the sequence so they don't stick out of the wings.
This is not even close to a 100% accurate retraction of the hellcat's gears. To do that I think you would need three sets of gears and they would make a 90 degree twist as they retracted, but i don't have the patience to do that. Only somebody named Mark would do something like that.
Nose Cone:
All of the Hellcat's I'd seen on the internet had their engines painted on becuase of limitaions with previous design tools. Since I was using FSDS I decided to do a little more with the engine. I added about 8 more cross sections to the front of the fusalage and then dropped them back inside, where I reshaped them and brought them out and did it again. A lot more detail could be achieved this way, but I split the part and lost the cross sections, whoops.
PS: If anybody has any other questions that they would like to ask about the plane, please don't hesitate to send me an e-mail at vootie@icn.ne.jp
