FS2002 1933 Kalinin K-7

The Russians developed several very large bombers between WW1 and WW2.  The Kalinin K-7 was one of the more interesting of these with its twin boom design, very large wing, seven engines and landing gear spats that were large enough to look like floats.  It carried a crew of 19, including personnel for 9 gun positions.  It was so large the landing gear struts contained inside stair wells so the gunners could climb up and down from the gun positions on the front and back of the landing gear spats.  The wing was thick enough for a mechanic to be able to walk upright out to the outboard engines in flight.  The K-7 was originally designed with 6 engines but it was felt it would be underpowered so the 7th pusher engine was added.  Even so, this huge plane could barely achieve 150 mph.  It did fly successfully and accumulated about 5 hours flight time before it crashed during a speed test.  One of the booms collapsed from what was later determined to be a classical case of divergent flutter in the horizontal stabilizer.  The control surfaces were so large there was no way a pilot was going to be able to move them with regular cable controls.  Kalinin developed some cable controlled trim tabs that were far enough behind the control surfaces they had enough mechanical advantage to move the surface the opposite way. ( If the trim tab went down the control surface went up, etc.)  I used SDLEdit to recreate those motions.  I found exellent drawings of this plane on a Russian Historical site, but only a few faded black and white photos.  I followed the paint job of a Tupolev bomber of the same time frame I had in some of my reference material.  I compiled this FSDS project into FS2002 and have not tried it in any other sim.  Please note this airplane was very large and underpowered so the flight dynamics are set to make it somewhat cumbersome to fly.  Just give it plenty of room for turns, etc.  BTW, I would like to express my appreciation to Dave Eckert for giving me some insight to using transparent textures;  Thanks Dave.

INSTALLATION: Unzip KalK7.zip into a temporary folder.  Copy the folder  K-7 into the aircraft folder in FS2002.  Copy the contents of the "Gauges" folder into the Gauges folder in FS2002.  Close everything and fire up FS2002.  This plane should show under Kalinin as the Kalinin K-7 in the aircraft selection list.

PANEL:  I could not find any information regarding the K-7 panel so I created a simple antique panel to show some of the excellent antique gauges created by B. Hundt and H. Weingarttner.   The throttle gauge is by J L Stubbs.

SOUND:   I included the BF110 sound pack by Mike Hambly and Gert-jaap van der Bij with its unsychronized engines.  I seriously doubt if there was any way to sychronize those 7 engines in 1933.   Be advised this is a CFS sound file and you may need to keep the throttle's cracked open a scosh or they will quit.

LEGAL: This project is released as freeware.  You may modify it, repaint it, etc., upload to another website as long as it is not for profit.  You need my written permission to use any of these files for commercial purposes; otherwise just give me credit for the original design.  This airplane should not hurt your computer but I am not responsible if it causes problems.

Enjoy!  Paul Clawson

Email:  [email protected]