BeamNG Air?

Current aerodynamics subsystem simulates each triangular surface individually. It also supports setting lift/drag/stall-angle parameters on an per triangle basis. These parameters have been designed in such a way to offer a good approximation for airfoil curves. We did the research and implementation work due to requests from moders that design airplanes. Even tho cars do not have the aerodynamic requirements of airplanes (excepting really fast cars), we have done all this work because we care about all physics (aerodynamics included).

Concerning the accuracy of physics, please consider that we are simulating a live changing geometry. When our wings flex the aerodynamics also change. This is extremely hard to pull off. When we started, i didn't expect that we would make it that far in simulating so detailed aerodynamics.

Having said above, i need to also point that the current aerodynamics are not perfect. There are things that we are still researching such as ground effect and inter-triangle effects (triangles affecting other triangles).

Concerning airplane simulator requirements. Yes, having huge terrains would be essential. This requires quite some work on the GFX side and it is in our todo list (not at the top tho). Concerning the aerodynamics, research is unpredictable, so it would be hard to provide a timeline for when improvements would be ready.

 

Yes, it is exactly that. I wanted to avoid the "airfoil in the middle of the vehicle" approach that RoR had. So what we did was to "reuse" the collision geometry information (collision triangles) to also drive the aerodynamics simulation. Each of the collision triangles is independently simulated at 2khz. Each collision triangle can also have an individualized parametric airfoil curve applied to it.

IMHO, a big part of the problem with BeamNG' aerodynamics is that it is very complex (for modders) to design/calibrate them. There are some extremely talented aero-designers in the community that can pull that off. But it isn't for the faint of the heart. A program that can do that automatically by running an offline aero-simulation method to find the parameters for the online model would help a lot. But this would require a serious amount of research too.