Along with today’s announcement of the Blood & Chrome trailer, the well-known sci-fi show of Battlestar Galactica is also making news thanks to five high school students. John Boyer, Alex Jacobson, Joseph DeRose, Sam Frank, and Sam DeRose are five high school students that have stepped up to the challenge to make a flight simulator based off of the Viper in Battlestar Galactica.

These five high school students are making the Viper simulator not just for fun, but for an engineering conference called MakerFaire. To give you a better idea of why they are doing this project, a provided an elaborative quote below from their project’s website.

“Our team is building this project as part of the Young Makers program. We want to learn more about engineering while we have fun making a project that hasn’t been done before. We like a challenge! We also want to entertain people at the Maker Faire and inspire them to make things themselves.”

A lot of advanced technologies are used within the making of this project, such as: lego models (used for testing) that are hooked up to computers, CAD software (Autodesk, and an actual encaged helicopter fuselage connected by a multiple-axis arrangement. The visual software packages used in this experiment are: Final Cut Express, Adobe AfterEffects, Adobe Photoshop, and GarageBand. A LOT of programming languages (such as Python) and methods are used as well.

To see how the students are creating the project, please view the video provided below.

As you can tell, this is a really complex and advanced project, and needs your financial help to be ready for completion. The estimated cost of completion for the Viper simulator $17,000. A full list of how the donations are broken down can be seen here. So that you don’t feel alone, Autodesk has already contributed $6,500 in corporate support.

As you can see, the Twitter community is pretty excited to see this project happen:

What do you think of this cool tech project from Boyer, Jacobson, DeRose, and Frank? Please be sure to leave your feedback below in this post’s comments section.