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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?"
BRL-CAD is probably the only full fledged package. Link:
http://brlcad.org/
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Wasn't it ideology that got us to the moon the first time?
-- http://vectorvector.tumblr.com/
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.
"Yes really, and Yes, we really are going to put man (and woman) back on the moon"
No you're not.
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.
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.
Or is the a scheme to get money out of stupid geeks by driving traffic to your website?
Drive geeks to their website? Everyone knows /. readers don't RTFA.
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.
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.
I looked briefly at the FreeCAD, it is impressive for a F/OSS project but I'm afraid it's not good enough yet to even make a plastic case for yer cell phone, let alone a propellant tank. For example:
The OP asked "what free s/w to use to build hardware to fly to the moon." My answer would be: "it doesn't matter, it won't work anyway." If I were to do the whole project, I would be first concerned about financing the whole project; cost of the best software on the market would be a drop in the ocean compared to everything else. People who started the moon project with a predetermined opinion what tools they will use won't get anywhere, not in the rocket science at least.
"This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?
"This dork can't even find himself a single woman to have sex with him, what makes him think he can write software that will attract millions of users?"
You see, it is possible to be highly competent at one thing and be not very competent in another. Even if they have the loose relationship of being two things that geeks tend to think are pretty cool, such as Engineering Spaceships and developing web sites and maintaining a web server.
Obviously I have not been able to view the web page due to it being slashdotted, but it is a good possibility that they didn't put much thought or effort into it. They probably thought "Hey, why don't we just cobble together a small web presence in case anyone wants to donate any money or otherwise contribute to our project. Let's not spend much time on it though as our aim is space travel, not web development.
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.
Actually, there is very little evidence that Interorbital has produced any real hardware in the past few years. Plenty of models and drawings, but no actual hardware (let alone flight tests).
(Posted AC because I'm in the industry, and Interorbital has made themselves a pain in the past for people who say this sort of thing about them. But don't take my AC word for it: go try to find evidence they've built or flown something. If they have, there should be plenty of info, right?)
If you want real web sites, check out people like Armadillo, XCOR, Masten, or Unreasonable, for example.
I really think you are over-estimating how much the average airspace engineer cares about website development. I think the parallel here is to ask: "This website developer can't even build a spaceship? Why do they think they'll be able to design web-sites." And although I will admit that designing a website is far far simpler than building even a small part of a spaceship, you still have to realise that they are completely different skills. I will admit though that I think these people are going to fail for different ideological reasons.
I wouldn't exactly call the N-1 "ready to go". Its first flight (Feb. 1969) exploded 69 seconds after liftoff; its second flight (the one in July) blew up 23 seconds after liftoff. Even if it had flown successfully in July, it wouldn't have had anyone on it--not even the Soviets were daft enough to put a crew on a rocket that had only flown once before.* And they certainly wouldn't have been doing anything more than an earth-orbit checkout. It would have taken really good luck on the Soviets' part, plus another Apollo 1-level disaster to NASA, to give the Soviets even a slim chance of putting someone on the moon first. And that's being generous. The N-1 never did work right; something about having 30 engines in the first stage just left too many things to go wrong. All four flights ended in explosions.
*Of course, the US did exactly that 12 years later. Actually, they had a crew on the very first space shuttle launch--no step-by-step or unmanned testing with that one.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
The bizarre occurrence relates to an old saying, which in the /. context reads something like:
"Those who post seldom read, those who read seldom post."