Flight Engine
- 3 Devlogs
- 17 Total hours
6DOF flight simulator in Python. I want to be able to use this in the future to optimize airfoil designs and also maybe build my own version of Kerbal Space Program!
I built a basic propulsion module but I haven’t gotten around to really implementing it yet I just put in some code to add it into some of the modules but I have not tested it. I’ve mainly been focusing on debugging the dynamics modules as I ran some tests with verbose logging and it appears that there is either something wrong with the calculation of the aerodynamic coefficients or there is something fundamentally wrong with the equations of motion. Here is a screenshot of the erratic behavior (pitch oscillating wildly, roll switching oddly between 0 and 180 degrees, velocity oscillating, altitude behaving weirdly, and all manner of weird stuff.
After starting a new project, I finished implementing V2 of the core data structures, 6DOF equations of motion, and aerodynamic model. I built some unit tests to make sure everything is working properly. Below is an attached screenshot of the test working (I think I may have forgotten to push the testing file to GitHub and only pushed the test functions instead of the file w/ the code that logs the runs)
I have forgotten to write devlogs on Stardance, I started the project but completely forgot to link my Hackatime. I have been working on the engine on and off for around 3 weeks now. The first version was intended to have a aerodynamic model class with all of the parameters such as coefficient of lift (and its derivatives with respect to variables like angle of attack) among others. However, the dynamics and math appeared to be extremely inconsistent and the simulation as a whole had poor stability. Tweaking the parameters (wingspan, chord, etc) of the wing just slightly caused large fluctuations. I was only able to achieve the stability demonstrated in the screenshots below with an essentially perfectly tuned NACA airfoil. It still does dive a bit more than I was expecting (aka what ChatGPT and Gemini were both expecting since I do not have a lot of extensive experience in aeronautics).
Due to these unresolved issues I have started a new version of the engine which I plan to add a bunch of unit tests to to ensure every module is working as intended, I accidentally overwrote GitHub commit history in the process rip :(.
