We are developing a UAV that will optically acquire a target and track the target until impact using an onboard camera and ground based video recognition software. We would like to simulate this event prior to an actual flight test. We currently simulate our system using Cloud Cap's hardware-in-the-loop development environment, which utilizes Flight Gear. We would like to be able to place a 3D image of an approximately 5ft diameter ballon in the Flight Gear environment. Is this possible? and if so can someone please direct me to the information I need in order to implement this. Thank you.Sage

Assuming that you want to position the balloon during the fgfs run, this is what I would do: Create a config file balloon.xml with these contents:<?xml version="1.0"?>0.00.0-1000.0balloonFGROOT-relative/path/to/balloon.ac/local/balloon/longitude-deg/local/balloon/latitude-deg/local/balloon/elevation-ft... and let's assume that you have this properly indented -- the crappy forum software removes all leading spaces ... then you can start fgfs like this:$ fgfs --config=/tmp/balloon.xml# this needs to be an absolute path!and the balloon will appear at lon 0/lat 0/elevation -1000ft. Now you can change the position in the property viewer (/local/balloon/latitude-deg, etc.), or per nasal script, telnet, or http. There are also the properties "roll-deg-prop", "pitch-deg-prop", and "heading-deg-prop" available in the same way. But you will probably not need them for a balloon. If the balloon should have some "intelligence" you'd better make it an AI object (look for carrier.xml).Please consider to subscribe to flightgear-users/-devel. This is *not* an official FlightGear support forum. There may be fgfs developers joining in and helping out, but there may also be none. (And this tiny editor window is a pain to work in. :-)