Who says that going to the museum is not educational, and neither is it inspirational? A bunch of students who were inspired after a trip to a museum decided to work on the Viper 2.0, which is actually a life-size flight simulator that has been fashioned after the Viper spacecraft from the famous and popular TV series “Battlestar Galactica.” The first Viper which was introduced at Maker Faire 2012 proved to be impressive, thanks to the talent of a certain Sam DeRose who now happens to be an engineering sophomore at Harvey Mudd College.
After paying a visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., DeRose was stoked. He shared, “They had a flight simulator that could turn 360 degrees on the roll axis, but not on the pitch. And it was so much fun riding on it [that] we wanted to build our own. We spent the next week dreaming up how we’d do it.” It took approximately four years after that to have the project take off, when DeRose mentioned that he and his family as well as friends felt that technology has finally caught up for the layperson to build something like that, and hence Viper 1.0 was born, followed by Viper 2.0 that you see above.