FOSS CAD and 3D Modeling Software? 413
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?"
Business model (Score:4, Interesting)
If a company can bring 200 kilos of moon rocks back from the moon, a mission could pay for itself from sale of the rocks. Easily $2000 a gram, perhaps more if some more interesting specimens could be searched out and returned.
If one could do a shot similar to Apollo, but unmanned, several metric tons could be returned, and be quite profitable.
Ask yourself how much a kilogram of martian soil would sell for, too.
Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [armadilloaerospace.com], XCOR [xcor.com], Masten [masten-space.com], or Unreasonable [blogspot.com], for example.
Re:Business model (Score:4, Interesting)
The cost of the Apollo space program is commonly given as $25 billion. When adjusted to 2005 dollars this would approximate to $135 billion.
200.000g * $2000 = $400 million. Granted, there was a bunch of first-time research and pesky human requirements to take care of back then, so presumably an unmanned rock-collector should be cheaper. Wonder what the cost per mission would be, how many trips they would have to do before breaking even, and if they would have affected the price of moon-rocks enough to affect their revenue by then...
Re:Is that so... (Score:1, Interesting)
CAD is dead it is all 3D modelling now with linked finite element analysis. No respectable engineering school teaches anymore.
I you want some FOSS in your software in the package try Solid Edge from Siemens it uses some FOSS internally
Re:You've raised $130 out of $7500 (Score:4, Interesting)
"This female surgeon can't even cook bacon and eggs, what makes the bitch think she can take out my kidney?"
Kind of like an engineer that can't even use blender! seriously I've used blender and even liked it. but the UI is an art in itself, the learning curve is very steep and the skills learned fall off rapidly if you don't use it regularly.
Re:Business model (Score:3, Interesting)
According to the last story on the space cannon [slashdot.org], the cheapest current cost to orbit was 11,000 dollar pr kg.
The Apollo lunar module [wikipedia.org] weighed 14,696 kg. That's 161,656,000 dollars just to get the damn thing into an orbit. A moon shot will be significantly more expensive.
And that's just the fuel costs. This doesn't include anything else. 161 million dollars to lift a lunar lander module into low earth orbit.
$2,000/gram of moon rock will make a dent into the expenses, but it won't make it profitable.
Re:FreeCAD (Score:4, Interesting)
Just to play the other side, as a mechanical engineer, I've done analysis in Comsol, Ansys, Fluent, and some custom Matlab.
Right now, I've been doing most of my analysis in Elmer (FOSS). If I was doing heavier stuff, I'd probably move to some version of Salome / Meca. These are all professional quality programs, but they're FOSS. The two are not necessarily exclusive. There are a set of libraries (OpenCascade) that has much of the framework needed to build interoperable Solid models, but nothing was out there for quite some time. FreeCAD is the one I keep hearing about, but haven't checked it out for quite some time. As such, I still Solidworks all my stuff.
Re:FreeCAD (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, both things are something that I wanted to mention but it was too late.
It does make sense for a company to *add* something to the existing package if they think it is a good idea. Modern CADs allow easy addition of 3rd party applications to the system, so that they have access to the models and can do things. There is a good number of 3rd party add-ons [tenlinks.com] for SolidWorks, for example. Your suggestion of refining "one thing" is very valid.
Outside of that, I do not know if Armadillo programmers' gaming experience fits well into the needs of a FEA. In games you need an approximate answer; an error within 10% would be invisible to the user. But you need the answer very fast. Gaming engine's physics module satisfies those requirements; you may need only integer math to get close enough. But in FEA modeling errors accumulate and propagate; they can lead to failure to converge when by all indications it should. So it is a matter of considerable concern, managing accuracy, precision and the size of the data (it's usually huge already.) SMP is typically supported by all modelers; some, like CST, support clusters. This is yet another thing that games don't need to worry about.
Also, NASA has lots of code specifically written for spacecraft simulation, and I'm sure Armadillo can get access to that - for use or for improvements as needed (and it is badly needed in some cases, the code is old.)
Slow and steady (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is my advice: plan a slow-and-steady strategy, rather than a "space race" strategy. Plan for effectiveness over the long haul, rather than short-term results.
That means you will be doing things rather differently than Apollo.
For software, as far as I can tell, nothing exists that will meet your needs. Thus your first step is to figure out what free software has a hope of someday meeting your needs, then figure out how to get developers to work on it until it does meet your needs. So, actually, your very first step is to find an expert in rocket design who can tell you what features you need, what software exists that can do what you need (even if you don't want to use it because it is proprietary). If you are very very lucky, you might find a retired aerospace project manager who will give you advice for free. (I don't think this is far-fetched. Anyone who worked on rockets in the glory days will be old enough to be retired now, and you might find someone who shares your dream and will give advice for free.)
For simulations and engineering computations, you should look at SciPy [scipy.org]. As I said above, it probably doesn't meet your needs now, but it has a solid foundation and lots of people working on it.
As far as a strategy for going to the moon, I don't claim to be an expert, but here is my advice.
You really, really do not want to try to re-create the Saturn V rocket. In fact, you don't want any design where you use up one rocket per moon trip. The slow-and-steady plan goes like this: First you get a "space pickup truck", some sort of launch vehicle that can reliably go to Earth orbit with a small payload (say, 1000 KG or so). Second, using many "space pickup" flights, you build a space station, and stock it with lots of oxygen, food, fuel, etc. Third, you build a "moon shuttle" in orbit, a vehicle that will never land on Earth and never land on the moon, but will safely travel between the fuel. Fourth, you build your "moon lander", which will be carried by the moon shuttle. Finally, you fuel up the moon shuttle and lander, and send a mission to the moon.
At that point, you have the infrastructure to visit the moon as often as you find convenient. You ferry up some more fuel, oxygen, and supplies, refuel the moon shuttle and lander, and off you go.
I'll point out that there are plenty of small companies trying to build a "space pickup truck" right now. You could sensibly just plan on hiring one of those, rather than trying to build your own launch vehicle. You won't get this project done tomorrow anyway, so you might as well start designing your space station and moon-specific hardware now, and just assume you can hire the orbital transport by the time you need it.
If someone gets a "space cannon" operational in time for you, so much the better. Use the cannon to send up lots of fuel and oxygen and such as cheaply as possible. In this case, you will want to build a "space tug" vehicle that can scoot around and collect the canisters shot up by the cannon.
The USA sent men to the moon using a cost-is-no-object, win-the-race strategy. You will do much better to incrementally build the infrastructure to go to the moon conveniently.
Good luck with your grand dream.
steveha
Are you insane? (Score:4, Interesting)
I lived with Windows my entire life until I left college, and embraced the FOSS community. Taught myself Linux. Taught myself a lot of things over the years.
I honestly would bleed for the concept of FOSS. To me, it's like handing the first man to own a model T his own torque wrench- totally freeing him to do something
he's never done before, with something he'll be experiencing for the first time.
But I'm sorry, FOSS CAD & Parametric CAD is total crap now, both from a usability and functionality standpoint. It's the one area that FOSS, I feel,
will never fill well. Why? 2 simple reasons:
1. User Interface- FOSS community, are you listening? Stop with all the damn menus. Learn how to make a decent GUI layer for some aspects of your
program. Even engineers are human- they need something to not only be easy to learn, but INTUITIVE. I'm not sugguesting it look like Fischer Price designed the
layout- just speak with a symbologist/iconographer. Seriously. Ask what your users do, and create usable icons and common actions.
Get over all your sanctimonious insistence on coding a program for numeric and input style- make even a single program with a decent GUI interface. Don't think I'm
calling out Linux people specifically- I use Autodesk Inventor 2010. Yes, legally. I learn it at a community college, and the new version is guilty of that too- older versions
had a more intuitive GUI. The new version takes a LOT of getting used to.
2. GOOD 3D support and rendering-
With all I've seen the FOSS community capable of in graphic rendering (blender, gimp, etc.), why do we lag so far behind in 3D processing? Gaming support famously
suffers massively, and along with it, decent parametric modeling in real time. I have yet to find any native FOSS CAD program, for any OS, that actually renders in 3D
well, or mostly, at all. This is something harder to fix. If the FOSS community could pool their resources to one massive program, like Shuttleworth did for Ubuntu, we
might have a chance. It's a Herculean task, and one I've seen FOSS struggle with for years.
I use Inventor now because it works (with a TERRIBLE interface in 2010), but in 3D mode, extrusion modeling/building makes part design like sculpting clay, one I understand
the commands. It's another ballgame entirely. I *WISH* I could do that with a FOSS program- bad GUI or no!
Inventor also has full kinematic modeling, for testing motion of interacting parts, and integrated stress analysis. Considering NASTRAN is coded in FORTRAN, if I remember
right, even stress analysis software is pretty proprietary, and noone has updated that on a massive scale since the 1960s! We're talking software initially developed for NASA,
and hasn't been re-coded in almost 50 YEARS. Fifty. If NASA can't fund it, who the hell can? (insert jokes about Richard Branson here)
3D CAD and such specialized software in FOSS has a long way to go. I hope I'm wrong. I have yet to see even one that was usable for extrusion style modeling, which almost
anyone can pick up easily once they know how to navigate the interface. Last FOSS CAD program I tried was Q-CAD- among many others like it, did no 3D, no extrusions,
and was a very poor UI. Did 2D well, but it, and many other small CAD programs in native Linux did the same thing. Hell, the only FOSS CAD I've ever seen that COULD do 3D
was by EmachineShop.com, and for free software, the rendering was decent- but the GUI is overly simple, only icons, very limited in modeling scope, and constantly had issues
with basic lines joining together.
I'm sure flames await me- as I am a basic, and probably average Linux user with almost no coding skills, but I have much experience hands-on with this style of software in /. daily, for 10 years, and has tried every program I could find in this area, I hope I'm wrong. I really do.
Windows AND Linux. And you know what, for a guy like me that reads
I hope I've only scratched the surface- but everything I've seen till now pales in comparison to Inventor. And with a UI as bad as it, that's pretty bad.
Re:No kidding (Score:3, Interesting)
If the man and women they intend to put on the moon need not to be "living and breathing" (i.e. if they're aiming at "Moon burials") it would save tremendous amounts of payload in Life-Support, plus Landing & Return vehicle.
Actually, now that I think about it, the market for Moon burials could probably lower the barrier to entry for a startup aiming at actually sending living and breathing humans to the Moon and back - how many people out there would be willing to pay, sau $200.000 to be buried on the Moon!???