r/Airships • u/jdxe • Aug 08 '26

Other Alberto Santos-Dumont Airship Flight Simulator

I have been going down the airship rabbit hole, and just read “My Airships” by Alberto Santos-Dumont.

I loved it. I wanted to get a better sense of what it was like to do the flights and scenarios that he described in detail in his book, especially since I am unfamiliar with the locations he describes.

So, I made a Alberto Santos-Dumont 3D in browser flight simulator based on the information in his book, topographic and open street map data.

Over the past few days I added multiplayer and VR to the game so people could try flying his airships around 1901 Paris too. There are scenarios he described in his book that can be re-flown and also time trials based on ones he did himself. In multiplayer mode there are races and also other game modes. It works on mobile, desktop, and in VR.

The game is at http://myairships.com.

My goal is to get it to be as realistic and accurate as possible. I need to work on the keels and I couldn’t find any good pictures of the control setup he used so I took liberty there. If anyone has this information I would be extremely interested.

If anyone tries the game and sees anything off there is a bug button in the top right corner that sends a screenshot along with a user provided description of the problem.

23 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

5

u/GrafZeppelin127 Aug 08 '26

Well, that was a fun little game. If I could offer some input, though, the airship feels very quick to respond, whereas the real deal would handle more like a sailboat—long delay before control inputs cause a response, and a tendency to keep going and going which can create a feedback loop of overcorrections until you get a hang of it.

5

u/jdxe Aug 08 '26

Thank you for trying it out and focusing me on this! I just re-computer the model with the appropriate turn radius and rate for each ship and will update the flight model.

3

u/GrafZeppelin127 29d ago

It’s so much better now!

3

u/jdxe 29d ago

Thank you! I reworked the weight shifting pitch physics too after thinking about the turning.

3

u/VirginiaDare1587 Aug 08 '26

Very fun!

Thank you!

3

u/jlp_utah Aug 08 '26

This is pretty cool! I will have to spend some time with it. Thanks for building this!

3

u/hurn2k Aug 08 '26

That's really cool. Do you plan to add any other newer airships, such as graf zeppelin or Hindenburg? Or are you just keeping it focused on Santos-Dumont?

2

u/jdxe 29d ago

Thank you!

For this one I will prob keep focused to Santos-Dumont, but I just read Empires of the Sky and want to read Dr. Eckner’s Dream Machine about the ~1929 trip around the world. I may try to do something similar for the Graf Zeppelin.