Hi Sunjunkiesi,
It makes sense that the actual flight model would use coefficient-buildup - this is pretty standard and as long as the data is valid, it can produce the most realistic flight model possible. In fact, all of the commercial fixed-wing Level-D simulators that I worked on in my career used coefficient-buildup with data represented in look-up tables. The obvious problem with this method is that, unless you have full access to the aircraft manufacturer's flight data package, you are making approximations or dealing with published flight data that is incomplete.
The big question for me is whether this sim will use a flexible data-driven approach as used in JSBSim. There you can define the logic and properties in data (even for the FCS), instead of having it all rigidly defined by the code. P3D's FSX based AC config files look very rigidly defined as compared to JSBSim, which restricts how the aircraft modeler can build a flight model.
My expectation would be that users can simply edit data files to define the aircraft aerodynamic coefficients for a given aircraft. My HOPE is that it is as flexible as JSBSim in that users can (for example) define a wind coordinate system vs a body coordinate system for the aerodynamic data, or can define the actual structure of the FCS using just data in an XML file. This is very powerful for aircraft modelers and would be amazing to have.
Regardless, I'm looking forward to how this product turns out - it looks very promising, especially with the focus on multi-CPU and VR. I could see potential commercial applications for low-cost FTDs using this sim and VR
.
Thanks for all your help!