NASA Open Sources Aircraft Design Software

First time accepted submitter sabre86 writes "At the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics Aerospace Sciences Meeting in Nashville, NASA engineers unveiled the newly open sourced OpenVSP, software that allows users to construct full aircraft models from simple parameters such as wing span and fuselage length, under the NASA Open Source Agreement. Says the website, 'OpenVSP allows the user to create a 3D model of an aircraft defined by common engineering parameters. This model can be processed into formats suitable for engineering analysis.'"

Comments

Re:Strangely

[vlm]

There doesn't seem to be a Linux port at the moment?

The link you're looking for is

http://www.openvsp.org/zips/OpenVSP_2.0_community_src.zip

They do not distribute a pre-compiled packaged linux version. Download source, compile, install locally, or wait for the inevitable Debian package to be created (assuming its "open source" license is DFSG free, I have not bothered to analyze it in detail)

Paper

[vlm]

All I can get from the website/wiki is thats its a tool that processes things, which is kind of vague.

I found this paper via google:

http://www.mae.virginia.edu/meclab/images/AIAA%20Paper%20--%20VSP.pdf

Not a goatse link, honest.

If you remember the microsoft flightsimulators of the 80s/90s you could list specs and it would make you a plane, like make me a plane with a 50 foot wingspan and then you would attempt to fly it. This is pretty much the same idea for spec'ing a plane but instead of simulating flying it, it dumps out a file containing the model that you can do "whatever" with. Something like clippy for aerospace cad "so you seem to be trying to make a twin engine turboprop, would you like a wizard to help with that?".