About atmospheric flight

[testadilegno]

Progress report :-)

I've mostly been searching the net and reading stuff, and I have found a few interesting things.

In order to put in a simple aerodynamic model, we can use rather simple equations (like the drag one in the code), and have the ships provide correct aerodynamic parameter. The most complex task is to get reasonable estimates for the lift and drag coefficients. In general, they are a complex function of the ship's geometry, current velocity, pressure, density, temperature and angle of attack. On the other hand, once you have them, the behavior of the ship should be rather realistic: most simulators use large tabulated data and opportune interpolating functions.

Operatively, I might have found a way to do that, using a simulator called OpenFoam: I will test it in the next few days and let you know. If this works, I might be able to simulate the aerodynamics behavior of our ship meshes ;-)

I also studied a bit the panorama of opensource flight sim, and I found out that FlightGear actually uses a specific engine to simulate aircraft dynamics. Maybe you know it already, it is called JSBsim:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/JSBSim
And it is used by FlightGear and other simulators as a solver library.
The interesting idea is that the JSBSim simulator library is "agnostic" and reads all the physics of the aircrafts (geometry, aerodynamics, payloads, engines, instrumentation, autopilot routines) from an XML file. It is possible to model very different aircrafts using equations, tabulated data, etc., and it is sufficient (although not at all trivial...) to provide an appropriate XML file.
I don't know if this can help you (e.g. for autopilot stuff, etc), but felt it was worth pointing out.

Interesting links:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsbsim/files/
http://www.openeaagles.org/wiki/doku.ph ... w:overview
http://openrocket.sourceforge.net/features.html

[impaktor]

Those are indeed interesting links.

Just to remind ourselves, this is the flight engine the pioneer dev team want to use: http://jsbsim.sourceforge.net/ which is used by FlightGear, as well as in research, apparently.