In flight the cockpit door is closed, here it is open. Open Cockpit is a section in Community where pilots show where they fly from: a desk with a joystick, three monitors or a simulator shell in the garage. Every pilot has one cockpit, a page you keep adding to: photos, a passport with the hardware and the story of the build. Others applaud and ask about the hardware in the comments, and the owner answers. Cockpits can be viewed without an account: a guest sees the callsign instead of the name.
How to open your cockpit
- 1Post photosThe Open your cockpit button in the section, then Add. Photos can also be dragged onto the grid, and a screenshot from the sim can be pasted from the clipboard: Ctrl+V (⌘V on a Mac) or the Paste from the clipboard button. Up to 12 photos, the first is the cover, the order and captions are changed right in the form, and the cross in a photo's corner removes it. A photo is compressed on your phone, and the geotag and other camera data are stripped on the server: only the picture reaches the feed.
- 2Fill in the passportThe sims (several if you like), the platform (PC, Xbox or PlayStation), what you fly, the view, hardware as tags ("Arduino Mega ×4", "second-hand MCP") and the year the build started. Ticking PC opens the Computer block: search suggests the processor and graphics card, a model that isn't suggested can be typed as is, and memory is picked from a list. All of it is optional, and the passport shows only what is filled in. The form ticks the sim for you from your tracker flights until you pick one yourself. The bottom line of the passport, hours, flights and share of the sim, comes from the tracker and cannot be typed in: it is what has actually been flown on this hardware.
- 3Tell the storyHow it started, what you built yourself and what you would do differently, up to 3000 characters. The story is optional, but it is what people ask about most.
- 4Open the cockpitUntil the cockpit is open it is a draft that only you can see. One photo is required: you can open the cockpit once there is at least one, and the form says so next to the button. The name, the story and the passport are up to you; a cockpit without a name is signed with yours. After that the cockpit appears in the feed, and every new photo moves it up in Fresh.
The feed and the cockpit of the week
The feed can be sorted by fresh, popular (applause over 30 days) or most discussed. Filters by sim, aircraft class and hardware tag are kept in the page address, so a selection can be shared. Above the feed stands the cockpit of the week: the most applause over the past week, Monday to Sunday, Moscow time. The cockpit also appears in the pilot profile as the Pilot cockpit block.
Applause
Cockpits are rated with applause only, no stars and no minuses. One mark per pilot, pressing again removes it, and you cannot applaud your own cockpit. The owner gets one line a day about applause in the notifications ("Andrey K. and 4 more pilots"), on the Digest tab.
Comments
Under a cockpit you can ask about the hardware or praise the build. Replies go one level deep: a reply to a reply joins the same thread. The owner's reply is marked Captain and highlighted, so the useful answer stands out in a long thread. The owner learns about a comment from the notifications, and the author learns about a reply the same way, on the “Needs you” tab. You can delete your own comment. If someone has already replied, the thread keeps a "deleted by the author" note and the replies stay.