I am new to the Flightsim community and have been watching the discussions in this forum. I have noticed that some people complain, suggest, call it whatever you want, about any design. They say that the nose is not quite right etc.My question is this: are the people who design these differnt airplanes using actual measurements taken from CAD drawings or even Maintainence Manuals??I remember workingas an aircraft mechanic some years ago when my company owned a Beechjet 400A. We had lots of manuals complete with scale drawings of the aircraft. If people designed their aircraft with actual measurements the complainers out there can talk all they want about the look of this or that. It is what it is!Comments welcomed.

You will probably find that most are designed from "3-views" which are readily available on the internet, this gives you front, side and top views of the aircraft in question. These would then be scaled using known dimensions and the design created "on top" of the view.Most designers would probably find a CAD drawing / maintenance manuals to be hard to come by, certainly I had very little information to be going on with the Mallard - although since then I am in a much better situation. Of course it is completely subjective, there may be different versions of an aircraft which have different geometry - you may not have enough information to get it exact, and then at the end of the day everyone views things differently anyway.Just to be slightly contreversial - does the shape of it really matter anyway?? Ok, you want to be able to look at the aircraft and know what it is - even better if it looks fantastic..... BUT FS2002 is a flight sim - it is about how it flies and looks from the cockpit. Everything else is just eye candy...... Don't get me wrong I love aircraft that are well modelled and painted but what is the point of getting anal about "the nose" possibly looking slightly off in the eyes of some users.(to use your example).. ..

I understand. I was just trying to get some feedback as to how designers design their aircraft. It was not meant as a critism against designers. It's just that I have noticed a lot of people talking about "getting it right". Just curious how they go about this. I know that there are several avenues to explore, and it seems to me that the best place to get the dimensions correct are from actual manuals maybe borrowed from friends working in the industry etc.

I know you didn't imply criticism. I am sure those with a lot more experience than me have better methods of creating their models (and probably better sources of information). I suspect that even being "in the industry" would not necessarily mean that you have scale drawings to hand....