On Tue, 2 Jan 2007, Maik Justus wrote: > I thought the next sentence in my mail is the explanation: > > "But his is not the real aim. I want to add the ability to use ropes. To > be used for winch as well as for aerotow."
The real challenge is to make it work over MP with a human piloting the tow aircraft. (A winch or a towing ground vehicle could by all means also be human controlled.) So what's your plan here? Add optional /external/ control of a thruster? Then it wouldn't matter if it's a towing aircraft being subject to a force pulling backwards or a towed aircraft being subject to a force forward. Same implementation. It would also work the same for helicopter sling loads. Or towing with mobile ground vehicles. But where would the simulation of the towing line go? (Stretch, drag, bend, weight, inertia... weak links? A winch wire or a pay-out line doesn't have a constant lenght.) It's not a "dead" object. A towing line can be released at either end, by the pilot at each end or by a snapping weak link at each end. So it's not really a submodel of any of the objects at the ends of it. I think the tow/airlift wire/line object should be it's own simulation instance. -- ? And of course, designing gliders per se doesn't require any patching of any fdm backend. The yasim solver needs a thruster element for determining drag, but the force from that would be the same fwd thrust produced from sink rate + mass and the L/D ratio at best glide or min sink. (easily calculated) L/D ratio and airspeed for best glide performance, and sink rate /airpseed for minimum sink (at a respective weight) are normally published data for gliders. Just pretend gravity is not perfectly vertical when defining <approach> and <cruise>... ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
