QGC with PX4-SITL/Airsim WITHOUT using localhost

Hi Everyone,
I’m a grad student getting started on a project involving Mavlink/PX4.

I have a setup with QGC+px4-SITL and px4-SITL+Airsim running on my windows 10 machine and everything seems to be running correctly. I captured some loopback traffic on 127.0.0.1 using Wireshark and was trying to parse the packets, but parsing was tricky because the packets were collected via local loopback and not ethernet.

I’m interested in setting up communications between QGC+px4-SITL and px4-SITL+Airsim using my laptop’s IP address (not on localhost). I know how to change the port numbers in both the Airsim/settings.json and QGC, but how can I set up the IP addresses so the connection is not all on localhost? Is this even possible if all the applications are running locally on my machine?

Any help would be appreciated.