Additional detail for modelling

[PeterQFR]

Desired documentation content.

Hi,
Like most people new to Aviary, I'm interested to try and optimise some parameters around a new aircraft design. Particularly I am also interested to see what mission profiles might be possible. However the modelling metadata is a bit tough to crack. The documentation is not that detailed and in particular, many of the unitless metrics are not well documented.. for example positioning units for wings, engines and loads.

Is there any existing documentation on your requested topic? Please describe.

There is the model metadata page, but that doesn't have complete descriptions of all the unitless numbers used.

Whilst looking around I found OpenVSP https://openvsp.org/ which is a visual parametric modeller for aircraft. It would be great to integrate that system to produce modelling files for aviary. It might require some sort of export script from openVSP to aviary.

Alternatively or in addition, what would be good is some tutorials that produce a model from scratch much like those on openvsp ground school:
https://vspu.larc.nasa.gov/

[jkirk5]

Hi Peter, thanks for the feedback!

If you can point me to some of the specific variables that you found to have unhelpful descriptions, I can try and update those. The long-term goal is to go through each variable one-by-one and review documentation for them, which isn't on the current to-do list, but I could knock of a couple right now if it would help!

On the subject of VSP,
We actually do use openVSP coupled with Aviary internally. There is a good chance we publicly release those wrappers at some point in the future, so keep an eye out for that!

I also agree that a more robust tutorial course would be really helpful, but I don't think we will be able to do that anytime soon. Time, funding, and the fact that the code is still changing fairly rapidly are major obstacles right now.

[PeterQFR]

Examples of not obvious factors:
aircraft:engine:position_factor
many of the scaler unitless factors.
aircraft:wing:max_lift_ref
For the example, doesn't have to be complex just a simple aircraft, easily understood like this minimum requirements foamboard aircraft :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xk9ecvgkU0

EDIT
Alternatively you could produce Aviary files from the aircraft described in the OpenVSP groundschool, that would help minimise the amount of additional documentation required.