I am in the initial planning/dreaming stages of a home cockpit. I don't care about mimicing any particular craft - in fact my son and I want to shoot for more of a spaceship feel than a traditional airplane.

I have some attic space behind a knee wall that I think we may use for the project, and since this space is immediately beneath a section of sloped roof (of about a 35% angle) I was thinking we could perhaps put in a big domed skylight and build the cockpit beneath it, as if the skylight were the canopy. Something like this, on a larger scale: http://www.eztopsworldwide.com/pcsl1.jpg

The pilot would be about 14ft off the ground and looking forward, with pretty good downward visibility regardless of how far their head was inside the skylight. Side-to-side visibility would depend on how far their head was inside the skylight. I can see some obvious issues with regard to the arrangement of displays, but I'm not sure what to make of them at this point.

My questions are:


  1. Has this been done before?
  2. What do you think of it?
  3. Would it add to the immersion and realism, or detract from it?


The alternative is probably a fully-enclosed and very dark cockpit project, in the same space but without the skylight. For your further amusement, I offer up this utterly un-creatable sketch of what it looks like in our minds:

sketch.jpg