In to the workshop

First preparations for the trip are under way.

Here’s the aircraft that will be carrying us on our journey:

She might not look much, but the Cessna Caravan has plenty going for her for a flight of this type. The turboprop engine offers jet-like reliability and performance, and there’s plenty of interior space that we can use in order to customise the aircraft for the unique challenges of this journey.

The first thing we’re going to do is rip out the seating and install an additional fuel tank for the long over-water sectors that we’ll face when we cross first the Pacific, then the Atlantic oceans. I’m keen to keep this realistic — I don’t want to just bung in an arbitrarily large fuel tank that wouldn’t fit inside the real aircraft. So I’ve researched the interior dimensions of the Caravan’s cabin. From this, it would appear that if we were to rip all the seats out, we could fit a 400 gallon tank in the cabin.

This has complications which we’ll get in to shortly, but first and foremost it’s very easy to add a new tank in FS. The very first thing I did, by the way, is duplicate the default Simobjects\Airplanes\C208B folder in order to keep our modifications entirely separate from the default aircraft. On my machine, I’ve called in C208B RTW.

Having done that, the first thing to do is open up the aircraft.cfg file. After modifying the title of the aircraft (you can’t have two aircraft with identical “titles” in FS) from “Cessna Grand Caravan” to “Cessna Grand Caravan RTW” and renaming the variation to “FSGlobeFlight” so we can find it easily in the aircraft list — I scrolled down to the [Fuel] section.

[fuel]
LeftMain = -17.0, -1.1, 2.5, 166.0, 3.6 //Longitudinal (feet), Lateral (feet), Vertical (feet), Usable(gallons), Unusable (gallons)
RightMain = -17.0, 1.1, 2.5, 166.0, 3.6 //Longitudinal (feet), Lateral (feet), Vertical (feet), Usable(gallons), Unusable (gallons)
Center1 = -20.2, -1.5, 0.0, 400, 2.1 // longitudinal, lateral, vertical positions from datum (feet), Usable(gallons), Unusable (gallons)
fuel_type = 2 //Fuel type: 1 = Avgas, 2 = JetA
number_of_tank_selectors = 1
electric_pump=1

I’ve highlighted in red the text I added. I copied the longitudinal, lateral and vertical positions from the payload stations section of the file.

Now we have a brand new tank, and opening the aircraft in FSX reveals that we can load fuel in to this tank.

The next thing to do is to add a gauge to display the quantity of fuel in the new centre tank, and ideally I’d like to add a three-position fuel selector as well. Gauge editing is something I’ve never done before, and so I’m in the process of researching this now. I had hoped to use the default C208 fuel gauge as a starting point, but it appears Microsoft have packaged it as a DLL rather than an XML gauge that I could read and edit, so it looks as though I’ll be going back to the drawing board.

FSGlobeFlight