Bodies Overview

Bodies are used in X-Plane to model non-lifting geometries and are primarily used to account for for wetted surface drag, flat-plate drag, supersonic wave-drag and sideslip effects. A body does not know if its a fuselage, a wheel cover, or engine pylon, or a weapon, it is simply some geometric shape, and for this reason, every body has a user-defined Part Description field to describe what it is used for. This is useful for your organization as well as identifying the body in any printed output.

X-Plane supports up to 39 bodies. A body may be attached to landing gear (for wheel covers), or engines (nacelles). When attaching bodies to either gear or engines, then the origin (0, 0, 0) point of the body will be relative to the individual gear or engine location the body is attached to. For other bodies not attached to landing gear or engines, The origin of those bodies is absolute and relative to the entire aircraft, all bodies sharing the same reference datum.

Bodies are defined by a series of cross section, which are commonly planar, but do not have to be. Each body may have anywhere between 3 and 20 cross sections.

Aircraft Datum

Modeling Strategy

Tips and Tricks

For a long time, many X-Plane devs have referred to Plane Maker as Pain Maker, usually due to the tedium of moving body section points around manually. But PlaneMaker have some useful little tricks that devs tend to forget, which can lessen that pain a bit.