Slashdot Mirror
FOSS CAD and 3D Modeling Software?
Paul server guy writes "I work at a privately funded, open source, manned, return to the moon mission — Yes really, and Yes, we really are going to put man (and woman) back on the moon. Since we are open source, we want all of our tools to be, too. What we are looking for is CAD software that we can feed into Blender (or the like) to do 3D modeling with. Many of the engineers have tried working with Blender and Art of Illusion, but have not been pleased. They want to just draw the parts, then feed them to the art people who will run them through the 3D modelers for videos, illustrations and such. What is your preference?"
It looks like that campaign was supposed to end last year, on Dec 31st. Why should we waste time answering your questions now, given the seemingly unrealistic goal, when you can't even format a donation box? Or is the a scheme to get money out of stupid geeks by driving traffic to your website?
BRL-CAD is probably the only full fledged package. Link:
http://brlcad.org/
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"Since we are open source, we want all of our tools to be, too."
Ideology won't get you to the moon.
FreeCAD https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page has made huge progress recently.
There are several CAD apps out there. It will eventually come down to trying them and personal preference.
Check them out at:
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=cad
http://freshmeat.net/search?q=cad&submit=Search
Everyone is going to be like "that's no moon" if you use open source graphics programs to plan your flight. But Gimp has a "sparks" brush for the stars.
... for planning another moon hoax. We all know they didn't go to the moon but filmed it back in Nevada, and they did it all without any flimsy-schimzy 3d effects.
I actually do a lot of work with Blender, and it can import a wide variety of formats. I would be very surprised it the CAD programs you are using don't export to at least ONE of the various formats Blender can accept. If you are using AutoCAD I think you have a good shot of an export to a ,dxf or .dwg are probably your best bets.
Put a Stallman on the moon, Im shure you will get funding
"Yes really, and Yes, we really are going to put man (and woman) back on the moon"
No you're not.
Why does it seem to me that if I were planning a trip to the moon, I wouldn't really have 'art people'?
Sure, it looks like he's plugging his website, but is it really necessary to point that out? I think we all can read. Maybe instead of boosting your own ego by putting him down, you could actually do something constructive in the minute it took you to reply to his post. In terms of free CAD software, BRL-CAD is probably the closest to what you're looking for, but I've always found it tiresome to use. It was developed by the Army for their computer modeling needs in the late 70s. It's still a fairly active project as well.
You're kidding, right? OSS CAD software is very amateurish and useless for any serious design purposes.
Drop your ideology and purchase some professionally developed proprietary software.
By the time I clicked the link, it was already slashdotted. If not, I'll have to check it out tomorrow (or not at all).
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
You're going to put a man on the moon.
With your organization that doesn't even have a wikipedia page (okay, maybe it will now since I posted the link).
And your server, which you posted to /., can't even handle the /. effect!!
I hope you and the other readers get some interesting suggestions about modelling tools, but I'm sorry, you don't have a remote possibility of making a moon shot.
I stole this Sig
HeeksCad is making progress. I don't know about feeding your parts into Blender, though. You may be able to shape the project some if you get involved, though. Somebody else mentioned FreeCAD. I've not yet tried to use it.
There's also gcad3d. I found that one to be tough to use, though. For 2D, I don't think that you have many options but qcad.
... for the website to be slashdotted. I think his attempt at getting traffic worked a little to well.
Being able to import CAD files into Blender should be the least of your concerns when choosing a CAD package. There isn't a free CAD package out there that will cope with designing a rocket and lunar lander. Spend your hard earned $130 (plus a lot more) on a high-end CAD package like Catia or Unigraphics.
Put a remote controlled or autonomous probe up there first. And try land near that weird castle thing on the dark side :P
~don't feel threatened by my pineal~
A Couple of others have already mentioned it, but take a look at BRL-CAD.
It's pretty much the standard. It originated as a US Government backed project and was later open sourced. This is a VERY mature piece of software, unfortunately with a steep learning curve.
Red
In addition to the comments here, you might find useful suggestions in this 2005 and this 2003 Slashdot discussion.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Do you really have to ask this question, isn't it obvious?
He answered already: they want to put a man on a moon and a woman.
It's a ploy for the man to get the woman. Obviously he figured that the only way to do so is to get her to the moon and basically eliminate the entire world from competing.
Also, he probably will limit her life support supplies, such as air, and she will only find out about it there and will be forced to beg him for this stuff. You'd think under the circumstances he is bound to get her finally.
You can't handle the truth.
The same reason a chicken wants to cross the road. It's over yonder.
Slashdotted already...
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
They key to every massive engineering effort is making sure you can do your model fly throughs form your cad drawings. You'd be sunk without them.
Is this a joke? Your team page shows you have at most four engineers, who are mostly IT geeks, not experts in propulsion, aerospace structures or astrodynamics, with the possible exception of Dr Snyder. You have a fricken artist before having a real engineering team, or anything solid to promote. You guys make Armadillo Aerospace look like Lockheed Martin. At least SpaceX etc. while lacking other things, started with something (usually money), you guys don't have anything. Quit wasting your time.
oh man, what a load - if you had real engineers working on actual moon project you'd be more worried about nonlinear FEA software at this point. There's a reason why the USA is the only nation to ever had put humans on the moon - it's way too complex, way too expensive, and requires way too many PhD level man-decade equivalents of effort.
Why is the parent moded funny? It's a very very reasonable approach. It really is informative well, and maybe insightful.
You can't handle the truth.
Doesn't work, and I speak from experience. I have done work for the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) doing similar things and what you are looking for doesn't exist on all sorts of levels.
First, engineering software is a very specialized beast in exactly the wrong way to exist as a FOSS project. For FOSS projects to exist you first need someone who is capable of doing the programing. Then they have to have a need that they want to fulfill. And they can't need it urgently enough that simply going out any buying a working package makes sense. None of this describes the type of people who are trying to design next-generation parts of anything.
It comes down to this: if you have the funding to actually make anything that you plan on designing you have the funding that paying for a high quality industry standard package is peanuts. And if you don't have the funding then it doesn't matter, does it?
It's the same reason that film and television production has always been happy to pick up FOSS solutions that already work but have never particularly cared about developing them. If you are operating at the professional level where you need these tools the cost of them is almost meaningless. It something that always confuses GIMP and Blender supporters who view it as personal software. For them shelling out $5000 a pop for software is such a big deal and they can never understand how the pros don't seem to care.
If you are seriously attempting to design aerospace hardware then you have moved into the realm where these types of software costs are basically meaningless. Suck it up and act like it. If, however, you are actually trying to become a proof-of-concept for FOSS in engineering work then I wish you the best of luck. However, those are two different goals and likely not compatible.
However, beyond the FOSS issue what you are trying to do will not work. Period. These types of software packages are very specialized for specific types of work and beyond a basic level are no good beyond that. 3D modeling software such as Blender or AoI (or Maya or Lightwave or 3DS Max...) are not CAD software. They are not even remotely CAD software. Yes, they appear superficially similar but they are NOT. 3D modeling software is intended to fake the appearance of large numbers of real objects. CAD software is intended to do what is basically visual math. 3D modeling packages have margins of error built in. Many of them will auto-round any equations or numbers entered. As such they are not suitable for real-world design of any complexity.
The types of data that CAD and modeling software generate are also not particularly similar. If you try and just toss engineering blueprints into animation software your artists will not thank you are the end result will look like ass. CAD tends to have too much and the wrong type of detail where animation software is looking for simplification and tends to simplify areas that need detail to look proper once animated. It takes almost more work to clean up a CAD model for animation that it takes to create one from scratch.
You can't really even send a CAD design right to a 3D printer without a significant amount of clean-up unless it was designed with that in mind.
So, to summarize, decide what you want each section of your operation to do and shell out the cash for whatever it takes to let them do it properly. Let everyone worry about their own needs and don't try and meddle by forcing the internal needs of other departments on them. If you were seriously planning on saving costs by not buying professional software for an AEROSPACE project then you are already fucked. You may as well blow all the investor's money on a massive party because it's lost anyways.
" privately funded, open source, manned" ...you may now add "slashdotted"
I'd be quite scared to be launched on the Moon by a company that asked suggestions about the tools to use on Slashdot!
If they didn't care for previous versions of Blender, they might want to try Blender 2.50alpha or a more recent test build (next testing build within 2 months), it is much more similar to maya and 3DS Max in layout and can have bindings customized.
LetterRip
I want to turn my used Toyota into a rocketship to get to the moon. Serious, no joke. However I'm having a hard time trying to program everything in QBasic, it seems the MSDOS console I shoved into the dashboard keeps crashing and my brakes don't work. Can you recommend an open source solution instead?
You'll probably end up needing some specialized, proprietary hardware if nothing else. You can't just whack any CPU you like in to your craft and call it good. You are dealing with a harsh environment and you need things to deal with that. Radiation hardening would be one, so that you aren't crashing all the time due to a bit getting flipped by solar radiation. Also for important things it had better be nice and redundant. You can just say "Oh just fix the bug and recompile" when you are talking about the air filtration system or the like.
Sending humans in to space and bringing them back alive is HARD, and thus expensive. Sending them to the moon is harder, and so on. This isn't the sort of thing that you can just knock together in your basement and say "Ya this'll work."
They're worrying about CAD when they should be worrying about calculations and broad, system-level design. Remember, the first moon missions took place without the use of CAD. Detail designing the parts is a relatively small part of aerospace engineering. A better approach would be to prove their engineering legitimacy by analysis, then impress IBM/Dassault enough to donate a CATIA license to them. Give the rough launch vehicle design, the mission orbit design, the reentry vehicle type, and detailed quantified justifications and tradeoff studies for everything. It should be heavy with physics, and the calculations should be airtight. Expect a 500+ page technical report for this scale of project at this preliminary stage. Any explanatory sketches can be done by hand or any illustration program. You only need CAD when you're (1) ready to machine parts or (2) ready for detailed computational analysis. These guys are jumping the gun.
CAD isn't just about coming up with the part geometry by the way. Modern CAD/PLM involves massive amounts of metadata about materials, dimensions/tolerances (all locked in proprietary file formats), and keeping track of the relationships between parts, sub-assemblies and assemblies. You don't want to manually copy & paste 300 fasteners each time you recalculate stresses on a rocket nozzle, do you? It also automates many tedious design efforts. Want to figure out how to snake twenty miles of wiring, hydraulics and other tubing through a rocket with a hundred thousand parts? Oh also, each type of cable/tubing has a different minimum bend radius because of material stresses. Arc it too tightly and it cracks open during the launch vibrations, after having fatigued due to ambient thermal variations. And these are just a couple mechanical aspects of such a sprawling project that CAD must handle. You could "draw" the parts of just about any modern machine (fighter jet, car, bicycle) with an old copy of Maya used for the CGI in Jurassic Park. It'd be useless for analysis though because of the low numerical precision, and impossible for engineering because they have the most primitive handling of parametric modeling, and crude ability to work with multi-component (thousands) geometry.
Any teenager can come up with some gee-whiz 3d animation (that Mars lander animation from years ago was done by one). Could any teenager get funding for a mission to the moon? Work on your numbers first, then worry about software, you IT geeks you.
If a company can bring 200 kilos of moon rocks back from the moon, a mission could pay for itself from sale of the rocks. Easily $2000 a gram, perhaps more if some more interesting specimens could be searched out and returned.
If one could do a shot similar to Apollo, but unmanned, several metric tons could be returned, and be quite profitable.
Ask yourself how much a kilogram of martian soil would sell for, too.
The parent has given you the answer you don't want, but it is nonetheless the correct one. There are several intellicad based products which are fairly mature (BricsCAD, for example) which are also interoperable with commercial software to an extent. Still, they're even more limited than the commercial products - both in capability and in productivity.
It's been 10 years since I was in aerospace (NASA and Orbital Sciences, FWIW), but the big push at the time was Pro/Engineer. They were, back in the late 90s, where AutoCAD is today. The learning curve was difficult and the software expensive - but it was damned impressive, and it got the job done on several complex geometry products.
It sounds like you're not going to the moon, but rather are exploring funding options and sources for a startup who's ultimate goal is intended to be a moon landing. If you were going to the moon, I would suggest you start looking at FEM and CFD modeling software for the structures (my area of expertise), and the myriad custom software bits for each of the critical components. I believe NASTRAN is open source, though I'm not aware of a GUI front end (which you will dearly want). FLAGRO (Also a NASA project) should be open source for fracture mechanics analysis, but it was really in its infancy when I left NASA.
This will sound funny, but you might want to go check with the amateur rocket guys to see what they're using. RockSIM is the gold standard for 6DOF simulations for rockets traveling up to the edge of space, if you're on a budget, but it's not open source. There is an OSS project very similar to RockSIM - I think it's called RASaero.
There has been a lot of money invested in creating tools for much of what you want to do - you'll be better served in the long run to leverage the closed source options, focusing on keeping _your_ IP free for anyone to use - if that's your intent. You can always give away your CADD - and most packages have output/converters to fully defined - of not OSS - formats.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Try CaeLinux http://www.caelinux.com/CMS/ a bootable CD distribution which is basically a collection of different open source Cad apps
I'm hoping to make a reprap 3d printer at some point, so I've been looking into writing some ebuild scripts to get some of the stuff from caelinux into gentoo
like Salome, elmerfem, brlcad
I'm not an expert in CAD mind you but some of the below may be useful
One of the things I've discovered is that there's a difference between 3D Cad and 3D Modeling software
Modeling is about approximating the appearance of an object for appearance sake only, usually using a mesh / grid of some kind, this is a typical use for Blender
CAD is about what the object is made of, and it's physical dimensions in real space, typically objects are constructed from primitives such as a hollowed out cylinder for example
Modeling = what you can see the outside appearance, CAD = the innards, what it's made of and more of a focus on measurements in real space
If your going to design something that's going to be built it's probably better to design it in Cad software first
then convert it to a modeling form later on for the sake of pretty pictures / animations / appearances in a demonstration etc.
This way the original design is stored in a form where there's actual physical measurements (in mm for example)
and in a form that can be manufactured (drill holes at these points here and here etc)
While Blender could in theory support CAD capability, I think it's current features are lacking in that area
(although it is open source so if you want to add those features go right ahead)
From a commercial perspective I think the 2 main packages are Catia and Solidworks
Also If you want to simulate the environment on a 3D Cad object, the usual way is via FEM or Finite Element Analysis
This is the sort of thing used to simulate the way temperature travels through an object made of different materials for example
I think Catia / Solidwords have this sort of thing already inbuilt, in the case of open source software there's a lot of separate packages to play around with (elmerfem for example)
I think the linux cae pages have some good tutorials / examples on this
http://www.caelinux.org/wiki/index.php/Doc:CAETutorials
Google Cache link
There is one bright shining star in the otherwise empty void of free engineering software packages. I would suggest that you investigate CAE Linux . From their website
Based on the open-source CAE softwares Salomé, Code_Aster, Code_Saturne and OpenFOAM , you can load your CAD geometry in Salomé and start partitionning and meshing your problem in just 5 minutes.
That being said, I'm a mechanical engineer, and I've messed around with CAE Linux, and this is *not* anything even close to what you get with Solidworks or Autodesk Inventor. While the FEA end is good, maybe even great, the modeling functionality is very basic and more akin to what you get with ANSYS or ALGOR rather than a full blown 3D drafting package. Nevertheless, its a great package for engineers and students who want to do some meshing and otherwise learn the basics of finite element analysis. The site even offers a standalone distribution of Salome-Meca-2009.1 which is the core FEA bundle that comes with CAE Linux. I have successfully installed their blob in Gentoo into /opt and it runs on my system at least.
As far as full featured free 3D drafting packages, there really isn't any such animal yet. Yes, I've tried BRL-CAD, and no, I wouldn't consider it to be a viable option. You're going to have to look towards some sort of professional CAD package for that. At home, I use TurboCAD as a reasonably full-featured yet relatively inexpensive solution. There are a great many lower priced 3D drafting packages out there, so look around.
And I must say, I really admire your ambition here... hope it works out for you.
Clickety Click
http://www.junauza.com/2009/12/free-and-open-source-cad-software-for.html You can also try VariCad at www.varicad.com Honestly, I think it's better to pony up the cash and get version of SolidWorks. See if you can split the costs with someone else. Then you will know for sure that is can handle the file formats of the other products.
Will a kick ass Speak and Spell hack help any?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
They tried, but they couldn't find an open sourced pen ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Here's a free CAD package that seems to be just the right caliber for your organization...Google SketchUp.
Mark Shuttleworth, is that you?
Post the models and analysis online - that's better in keeping with the ideal of a F/OSS project anyway. I use ProE professionally and had used Solidworks 2003-2007 while at school. ProE has all the required features and is improving with the UI, while Solidworks is the other way around. On the balance, they're both perfectly viable engineering tools.
However, getting all the features included (assemblies, full GTOL support in drafting, harnesses, ECAD integration etc) while maintaining a vaguely usable UI seems to be currently beyond what FOSS projects can deliver. The CAD market is growing and highly competitive - and even then the professionally-developed software has trouble getting these things right. A couple of weeks ago I was involved with a plastic part redesign because the ECAD -> ProE interface lost a couple capacitors in the translation and prototype parts ended up interfering.
FEA and CAM are two other areas that require a significant amount of effort to get 'right'. ANSYS (FEA) has been developed since at least the 1980's and is still either 'easy to use' or 'fully featured'. CAM (CNC pathing, etc) is critical for prototyping components quickly and accurately.
Add to all that, the fact that none of the open interchange CAD formats (STEP, IGES, STL for 3d) contain all/any of the metadata (parametric model data, dimensioning and tolerances, for example) that proprietary formats do. For CAD software to be useful, it must be able to interchange data with other systems - every company/effort will need to exchange CAD data with another at some point, to communicate with a partner, vendor, consultant etc.
Long story short, proprietary CAD packages are the best ones available, which should be the real concern for a manned space program (since people's lives are clearly immediately at stake). They have the experienced people in the jobs market and the extensive knowledgebase needed to work through day-to-day problems. I can just google something to find out how I can do what I need to in ProE, or walk down the hall and talk to the guy who's been using it for 20 years. If I needed to submit a bug request and wait for a response and work-around, I wouldn't be able to do my job.
No one's mentioned avocad-cad yet?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Ah, NASA already put someone on the moon - WITHOUT CAD SOFTWARE. Please, the costs of putting someone on the moon far exceed the cost of AutoCAD. Splurge a little.
They used cheap engineering software and the moon-shot missed a mile,
The fellas in that rocket won't be back for quite a while.
http://www.cenon.info/frame_gb.html
Despite what everyone seems to be saying. I think I should point out two things. One, yes free CAD all sucks right now. Two this project is very viable. You just need to design and develop a concept, start a nest egg, begin investing in the projects future. If you can raise a few million dollars in the next couple of years, in fifty, or seventy-five years you'll have enough money to start building the mission. (You have to invest wisely, bank on the power of compound interest, and assume the cost of the mission will come down a couple orders of magnitude, but these aren't unreasonable assumptions.)
I think that's the business model they're currently using. It doesn't have a great track record.
---
CAD Feed @ Feed Distiller
The parent poster is very informative, and practical, although misses the open source point as a cultural thing, as well as does not discuss the issue of open standards, which may be even more important than open source for a big project (since with open standards, you can at least replace tools over time).
Also, since much work related to rocketry is considered some form of munitions, that is another stumbling block. Although hopefully OpenLuna can avoid most of those issues and focus on the habitat aspect?
But there is one other aspect that is even more important than CAD, and this is simulation and related standards for storing that data connected to simulations. And there are all sorts of simulation tools emphasizing all sorts of different things at all sorts of different levels of detail. And there are all sorts of very interesting simulations that can be made about how to make things that have both on-Earth benefits and advance the cause of making space habitats.
Take for example these ideas for the US National Institute of Standards And Technologies:
"Sustainable and Lifecycle Information-based Manufacturing"
http://www.mel.nist.gov/programs/slim.htm
"The United States needs to prepare for a future where products are 100% recyclable, manufacturing itself has a zero net impact on the environment, and complete disassembly and disposal of a product at its end of life is routine. To document and monitor these changes, US industry will require key resources and methods that will enable it to measure sustainability along several dimensions (such as carbon foot print, energy accounting and recyclability of materials) allowing accurate assessment of status and progress."
That is exactly the kind of information you need in designing a space habitat too, whether on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, or even anywhere on Earth (like under the sea, or in Antarctica, or in the desert).
Over the last ten years this paper I co-wrote for the Space Studies Institute conference on space manufacturing has gone from unimaginable to mostly obsolete, now that so many people are doing open source design. :-)
"A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to the Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
But, one big issue to consider is to save design costs, you ideally need a good simulation framework for doing virtual testing of concepts. And to do detailed simulations, you ideally might need millions of people to donate spare CPU cycles. If you can get to the point where you can launch an automated seed factory to the moon that would then build infrastructure, all you would need is a billion dollars to build it and launch it (which hundreds of individuals could swing today). But to get to that point you need a credible design. Getting that design together, with as much virtual testing as possible, is something that could productively occupy many people for years, and the best value for a small group might be to put together enough seed information to make the equivalent (maybe not web based) of a Wikipedia of space habitation and open manufacturing information. Three fizzled attempts by me in those directions from years gone by (roughly two, ten, and twenty years ago, respectively):
http://www.oscomak.net/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/prototype.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
James P. Hogan, the sci-fi writer, has been a big inspiration to me, especially with these with two books:
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"Good luck Mr. Goresky wherever you are." (Armstrong)
If I were riding a spacecraft to the moon (or riding any vehicle that could easily kill me), I'd want it designed with the best tools for getting the job done. If that's a closed source tool, buy the closed source tool.
You're going to "put a man (and woman) back on the moon?" Not possible. No woman has ever been to the moon.
professional CAD users need to grow some balls and use BRL-CAD.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I once met the CEO of Rotary Rocket (remember them? SSTO?) He told me that people started taking him seriously after they built their own vertical assembly building at Mojave.
Rotary Rocket failed because the proposed ultra-light rotary engine didn't work, and the off-the-shelf engine they substituted was too heavy to make it to orbit.
Nope, Wishing I hadn't posted the website at all, I'm just looking for some software to let the Engineers share data with the Artists, Not stir up this hornets nest.
Your Moon, Your Mission, Get involved! http://www.openluna.org
Here is my advice: plan a slow-and-steady strategy, rather than a "space race" strategy. Plan for effectiveness over the long haul, rather than short-term results.
That means you will be doing things rather differently than Apollo.
For software, as far as I can tell, nothing exists that will meet your needs. Thus your first step is to figure out what free software has a hope of someday meeting your needs, then figure out how to get developers to work on it until it does meet your needs. So, actually, your very first step is to find an expert in rocket design who can tell you what features you need, what software exists that can do what you need (even if you don't want to use it because it is proprietary). If you are very very lucky, you might find a retired aerospace project manager who will give you advice for free. (I don't think this is far-fetched. Anyone who worked on rockets in the glory days will be old enough to be retired now, and you might find someone who shares your dream and will give advice for free.)
For simulations and engineering computations, you should look at SciPy. As I said above, it probably doesn't meet your needs now, but it has a solid foundation and lots of people working on it.
As far as a strategy for going to the moon, I don't claim to be an expert, but here is my advice.
You really, really do not want to try to re-create the Saturn V rocket. In fact, you don't want any design where you use up one rocket per moon trip. The slow-and-steady plan goes like this: First you get a "space pickup truck", some sort of launch vehicle that can reliably go to Earth orbit with a small payload (say, 1000 KG or so). Second, using many "space pickup" flights, you build a space station, and stock it with lots of oxygen, food, fuel, etc. Third, you build a "moon shuttle" in orbit, a vehicle that will never land on Earth and never land on the moon, but will safely travel between the fuel. Fourth, you build your "moon lander", which will be carried by the moon shuttle. Finally, you fuel up the moon shuttle and lander, and send a mission to the moon.
At that point, you have the infrastructure to visit the moon as often as you find convenient. You ferry up some more fuel, oxygen, and supplies, refuel the moon shuttle and lander, and off you go.
I'll point out that there are plenty of small companies trying to build a "space pickup truck" right now. You could sensibly just plan on hiring one of those, rather than trying to build your own launch vehicle. You won't get this project done tomorrow anyway, so you might as well start designing your space station and moon-specific hardware now, and just assume you can hire the orbital transport by the time you need it.
If someone gets a "space cannon" operational in time for you, so much the better. Use the cannon to send up lots of fuel and oxygen and such as cheaply as possible. In this case, you will want to build a "space tug" vehicle that can scoot around and collect the canisters shot up by the cannon.
The USA sent men to the moon using a cost-is-no-object, win-the-race strategy. You will do much better to incrementally build the infrastructure to go to the moon conveniently.
Good luck with your grand dream.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Have you seen the list of Open Engineering Tools over at DevelopSpace (http://wiki.developspace.net/Open_Source_Engineering_Tools)? Not sure if it helps with the immediate need, but it is the most comprehensive list of open source tools for all things engineering I have found.
"To hasten the advancement of humanity into a spacefaring civilization..." -- http://www.mach30.org
The same question about "fully featured and easy to use" CAD programs were asked when the OScar project started: http://www.theoscarproject.org/
I answered as you did above. People did not want to hear it. I suspect, they never figured out the difference between CAD, CAM, CFD, FEM versus 3D animation modelling packages (Blender, Maya), 2D vector drawing programs (Inkscape) and MS Paint (to be a bit drastic).
The type of high-visibility OS hardware projects seem to attract only day-dreaming non-engineers, which is what repells real engineers even further (because you have to deal with such people at work already, why having them around during your spare time, too?)...
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
Re:Please, please do not donate to this project
You sir, are an ass.
Your Moon, Your Mission, Get involved! http://www.openluna.org
He has a point, might as well donate the money to charity.
OpenLuna is a volunteer organization: we welcome and encourage your participation beyond basic membership. If you desire active involvement, introduce yourself to us and we will find a way to use your talents.
"We're particularly interested in people who might have one or more engines lying around capable of driving a multi-ton payload to a translunar injection. Oh, and any radiation shielded crew modules and/or several billion dollars in venture capital would be an added plus!"
"We have a prototype all drawed up and everything!"
"We'd like to thank the Sustainable Farming Student Collective at Berkeley for the astronaut garb. Who would have thought you could make a spacesuit out of hemp?""
I'll have Gary go look, Thank you...
Your Moon, Your Mission, Get involved! http://www.openluna.org
Why is the parent moded funny? It's a very very reasonable approach. It really is informative well, and maybe insightful.
Rubbish. She'll tell him what a great friend he is and then, just when he thinks he's in, she'll say "I don't think of you that way even though you ARE the last man on the face of the earth^H^H^H^H^Hmoon."
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
So, anybody help you find anything yet?
I only know of BRL-CAD that would be suitable for defining geometry that you could actually fabricate (as opposed to geometry for pretty pictures).
http://brlcad.org/
It has hit /. before http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/08/1823248
I lived with Windows my entire life until I left college, and embraced the FOSS community. Taught myself Linux. Taught myself a lot of things over the years.
I honestly would bleed for the concept of FOSS. To me, it's like handing the first man to own a model T his own torque wrench- totally freeing him to do something
he's never done before, with something he'll be experiencing for the first time.
But I'm sorry, FOSS CAD & Parametric CAD is total crap now, both from a usability and functionality standpoint. It's the one area that FOSS, I feel,
will never fill well. Why? 2 simple reasons:
1. User Interface- FOSS community, are you listening? Stop with all the damn menus. Learn how to make a decent GUI layer for some aspects of your
program. Even engineers are human- they need something to not only be easy to learn, but INTUITIVE. I'm not sugguesting it look like Fischer Price designed the
layout- just speak with a symbologist/iconographer. Seriously. Ask what your users do, and create usable icons and common actions.
Get over all your sanctimonious insistence on coding a program for numeric and input style- make even a single program with a decent GUI interface. Don't think I'm
calling out Linux people specifically- I use Autodesk Inventor 2010. Yes, legally. I learn it at a community college, and the new version is guilty of that too- older versions
had a more intuitive GUI. The new version takes a LOT of getting used to.
2. GOOD 3D support and rendering-
With all I've seen the FOSS community capable of in graphic rendering (blender, gimp, etc.), why do we lag so far behind in 3D processing? Gaming support famously
suffers massively, and along with it, decent parametric modeling in real time. I have yet to find any native FOSS CAD program, for any OS, that actually renders in 3D
well, or mostly, at all. This is something harder to fix. If the FOSS community could pool their resources to one massive program, like Shuttleworth did for Ubuntu, we
might have a chance. It's a Herculean task, and one I've seen FOSS struggle with for years.
I use Inventor now because it works (with a TERRIBLE interface in 2010), but in 3D mode, extrusion modeling/building makes part design like sculpting clay, one I understand
the commands. It's another ballgame entirely. I *WISH* I could do that with a FOSS program- bad GUI or no!
Inventor also has full kinematic modeling, for testing motion of interacting parts, and integrated stress analysis. Considering NASTRAN is coded in FORTRAN, if I remember
right, even stress analysis software is pretty proprietary, and noone has updated that on a massive scale since the 1960s! We're talking software initially developed for NASA,
and hasn't been re-coded in almost 50 YEARS. Fifty. If NASA can't fund it, who the hell can? (insert jokes about Richard Branson here)
3D CAD and such specialized software in FOSS has a long way to go. I hope I'm wrong. I have yet to see even one that was usable for extrusion style modeling, which almost
anyone can pick up easily once they know how to navigate the interface. Last FOSS CAD program I tried was Q-CAD- among many others like it, did no 3D, no extrusions,
and was a very poor UI. Did 2D well, but it, and many other small CAD programs in native Linux did the same thing. Hell, the only FOSS CAD I've ever seen that COULD do 3D
was by EmachineShop.com, and for free software, the rendering was decent- but the GUI is overly simple, only icons, very limited in modeling scope, and constantly had issues
with basic lines joining together.
I'm sure flames await me- as I am a basic, and probably average Linux user with almost no coding skills, but I have much experience hands-on with this style of software in /. daily, for 10 years, and has tried every program I could find in this area, I hope I'm wrong. I really do.
Windows AND Linux. And you know what, for a guy like me that reads
I hope I've only scratched the surface- but everything I've seen till now pales in comparison to Inventor. And with a UI as bad as it, that's pretty bad.
But it is a perfect plan. Does she decide to do so, he would have a range of options, from not giving her air at all, to providing her with an air mix with some 'kick' in it. Either way, she will end up in his hands, dead or alive and funky!
You can't handle the truth.
Apparently despite the fact it has virtually everything a 3d artist wants, the UI is horrible. The UI however was not initially designed by the FOSS community.
Yes.
I can't figure out Maya.
If that's the case then Blender would not be running production studios to figure out what problems are with the software and then fixing them.
You can, it's called Staroffice.
GIMP is fine, you just need to know how to use it. A lot of people complain about the lack of CMYK color profiles, I figured out how to set them up myself - obviously the people who tried it never bothered to learn the software properly. It is not Photoshop, the software's design goal is just for image manipulation and many people don't seem to get that.
It's nothing to do with the development philosophy catching up though. It's the exact same issue that proprietary developers would be having if they were developing CAD software from scratch.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
And you, sir, are giving a rather poor impression of your attitude, and by implication, the likely success of your project.
Leaders lead by inspiring. They don't moan at strangers for not fawning over them. The onus is on you to show that your project is more than a risible waste of money and effort. Do you have a plan for doing that, or would you rather spend your time bitching at people for showing healthy skepticism?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
...and are not trivial!
Cars are trivial because they are going to be a footnote of stupidity in our history. A small blip. They overwhelm us now, but in a few hundred years they will just be archaeology and museums. Bicycles will still be in use. Probably also modern airplanes and spacecraft.
Stupidity is its own reward.
I've made some things in CYCAS 3d. It's not too bad but it is limited. I was using the free version. I'm not sure the license is free or not... I thought it was. It's more architectural software really. It was the only thing I could figure out how to use on linux anyway. There is also the Google CAD thing... but that is probably free only as beer.
Recently I got a chance to use Solidworks and I don't think I'm going back to CYCAS. If I was more into architecture though... it did have some features that I can't equate to Solidworks... but not nearly as many as vice versa.
Stupidity is its own reward.
Why FOSS CAD software full of bugs and missing half the functionality, or (really) expensive proprietary CAD programs, if you can still use the good old paper and ink? Just a reminder that there are more options.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
It should also be noted that one can get very good commercial CAD software for a FOSS OS
Uhh, almost all of the major CAD packages will work under Linux since the CAD packages were initially designed to run on UNIX decades ago...
What FOSS tools should I use for this?
Yes, R&D verification that was inefficient, and probably led to massive overbuilding and wasted cost in the fabrication and construction of the assemblies involved with Apollo.
Massively computed FE makes things cheaper and safer. It would be lunacy to even think about doing hand calcs for a multi-million DOF dynamics problem. The analysts that do this work in various manufacturing fields certainly have the mathematics capability to do what was done during Apollo, but they do things better now by leveraging the tools at their disposal.
The is a real issue in the lack of CAD software and accounting software that is capable. Flame me if you will, but it's true. I remember a time when AutoCAD supported or tried to support just about every OS. Then sometime int the 90's or late 80's they decided just to support windows only. Of course their might be some real high end Unix stuff that will work but lacking millions of dollars to know, I just couldn't say.
Look for yourself, most if not all programs are just not there. No parametrics, well not even up to 1990 yet compared with commercial software.
http://sourceforge.net/search/?words=CAD&type_of_search=soft&pmode=0&words=CAD&Search=Search
they want to put a man on a moon and a woman.
Where do I sign up to be put on a woman?
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
That's what the Artemis Project did (http://www.asi.org/adb/index.html). Their plan might actually have worked except it depended on using either the Titan IV or the Space Shuttle to get their trans-Lunar vehicle into LEO.
But they had the right ideas: Assemble existing components and sell the film rights. The SpaceHab modules were a great idea. Could still be if there were another launch vehicle that could carry a payload that large.
Nevertheless, their website appears to still have a lot of useful information on it,
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Looking at what your trying to accomplish, there is much more to consider than just being able to create 3D objects. While there are some free CAD software programs out there that can do a very nice job of limited spanning functionality, it would take a dedicated team years to develop any FOSS project to the level of AutoCAD. While Adobe is porting Photoshop to Linux, and GIMP is a very impressive alternative, it takes years for professionals to realize all that Photoshop can do. AutoCAD is the same, and has become the industry standard. Not only has amazing built-in functionality, like structural analysis, stress testing, and the lates version can do 3D renderings and animations built right into it. In the long run, you'll have spent enough time and resources trying to work with a FOSS CAD program, then it would have cost to just purchase AutoCAD. Sad, but true, and is an area I wish there was at least a competitive FOSS application available.
with the author of the story, of-course, first you have to be put on a moon though, then on a woman. She may or may not agree, but in those conditions you shouldn't have too much trouble.
You can't handle the truth.
"This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?"
Hey, you laugh, but this happened to me. Sure enough, kidney was burnt to a crisp on one side, and all runny on the other...
Bow-ties are cool.
There isn't any good open source CAD software. And, there isn't any CAD software that I know of, open or closed, that has a good interface. I have not seen much CAD software recently, but I suspect they are as closed, insular, and uncompetitive as ever, and that their software still suffers from this. Still insanely expensive, and still full of embarrassingly unpolished user interactions that would never fly in other kinds of applications. We've been needing good open source CAD software for many years.
BRL-CAD is a case in point. Miserable interface. AutoCAD was slow to get with the GUI-- version 12 from the early 90s still had a text based interface. That wouldn't be so terrible, but even with all the effort they saved in not doing a GUI, they still couldn't make a decent text screen interface. An example of what I mean is the dialog to load a drawing. You had to type in the name of the file you wanted, not select from a list, and you had to do it from memory or a note because it would not display any file names while it was waiting for your input. To see a listing of files, there was a separate menu item. And, couldn't press one key to select a menu item, no, had to follow that keypress with a press of the Enter key. Unbelievably crude. I have not seen recent versions of AutoCAD, but I suspect that their interface still stinks. Another terrible feature that seems common to a great many CAD interfaces is this idea of entering points into a drawing or diagram with the mouse pointer. Forces you to spend lots of time making extremely small mouse movements to get that pointer on 4.2, not 4.19999 or 4.20001. They all have grids and "snap to grid" features to help with that, but that's not enough. Then, to do something like a simple pan, you have to dig down into the menus, choose how you want it to interpret the numbers or points it is about to demand, and then give it those numbers or points. The interface to typical CAD software is full of garbage like that. Contrast that with how you move around in a typical 1st person shooter. They really, really need get a clue and look to game interfaces for some inspiration.
I gave FreeCAD a quick try. When it became clear that just getting FreeCAD to compile in Linux was going to be a big job, I dropped it.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Given the funding for this fine, and noble project. Maybe suggesting to the Engineers that they, "Do what it takes, and just suck it up." Or get ready to spend about $200,000 in a MCAD package, and some more money on PLC machine. About $1,000,000.00 will get them what they need, or they can read books on how to make machines that make parts for machines; then assemble the parts. I know its sounds like tough love, but this should have been evaluated at the beginning of the project, not at some midpoint, or Mile Stone point. I wish your project luck, and "God Speed..."
"Blender" and "Moon Rocket" are two words which do not belong in the same sentence. You are joking, right?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism