> ..ok, time for another of my stupid questions: Mathias, does your > new model code include tire creep? And tire sidewall flex?
There are a lot of tire effects that might be modeled. The question faced in deciding what to model is: given the purpose of this FDM, what should be included to achieve the desired effect? There are some great technical papers hosted in the NASA Langley (and perhaps NASA Dryden) technical report servers. Several years ago when I was doing some initial R&D for the JSBSim gear model I had some discussions with Bob Daugherty of NASA Langley about gear modeling (where they do a lot of very serious gear modeling and analysis), and he also referred me to some papers. The range of characteristics that might be modeled include tire slip, tire "wind-up", spin up, and complex strut interactions, to name only a few of the more difficult ones. These problems are difficult even for detailed engineering sims, and in the case of trying to model any generic vehicle, these problems are compounded. There are some things I'd like for us to model, but JSBSim also hopes to remain comprehensive and comprehensible at the same time, so modeling some of the more subtle effects probably is not worth the effort. In any case, Mathias and I in particular are working on some sweeping changes for JSBSim that ought to make the gear modeling much more stable. After that, there are many other improvements to make - one of which is looking at the gear model to discern where improvements can (and _should_) be made. In the meantime, we are discussing some changes that might be made and doing some limited research into the matter, including reviewing the approaches used by other simulators such as racing sims. Jon _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
