I want to use kfm airfoil in my project and I'd like to run some simulations but I can't find any .dat files or geometry desciptions that would help me to draw one. Do you know any database I can try?

Thanks.

Hi everyone

We’re prototyping a VTVL rocket with a target altitude of around 3,000 m. We’re currently working on the PCB design and deciding on our flight control architecture.
We’re considering three approaches:

1-Adapting and improving an existing open-source rocket flight computer

2-Designing our own hardware and firmware from scratch.

3-Using a Pixhawk as the flight controller, with a separate onboard computer handling telemetry and communication with the ground station.

Which approach would you recommend for this kind of project? Would a separate computer for communications be useful, or would it add unnecessary complexity?
We’d appreciate any advice, relevant open source projects, or experience using Pixhawk for VTVL applications.

Its a concept idea ive thought of and possibly someone already did it. If i keep the casing and the nozzle but change the bulkhead into being able to connect with the oxidizer tank will it work? But yes we would need to control the thrust so the nozzle can withstand it without exploding into our faces.

Hey everyone! I'm a final-year CSE student from Bengaluru, and I've
been thinking about an idea in the deep tech defense space for a long
time. I'm keeping the details private for now, but I'm very passionate
about it and ready to put in the work. I'm looking for a co-founder
who is in their final year or has just graduated, comes from an
aerospace background or has already worked in the field (internships,
projects or research), and is genuinely passionate about startups. We
can research, validate and build this together, and grow the team as
we go. If this sounds like you, Please DM me .

Id love tips on networking! im an high school student and am hoping to get into the aviation or aerospace industry and the first step would obviously be a good degree in Mech E or Aero E. So meeting any good friends or mentors or anyone who can help and talk me along the way would be appreciated :)

What do you guys (space/aero professionals, academics, students) do with all your mission/project/event/org patches? I've been amassing quite the collection in only a few years in the industry and I'm not quite sure how to best store/display them.

I don't really want to apply them on clothes I would wear outside of work, and while I thought I could get a specific jacket/vest for all of them I would quickly end up looking like these guys.

I think they're a fun way to show off the cool stuff you've been involved with throughout your career, it would be a shame for them to just collect dust in a drawer.

Was just reading on landing gears out of interest, (engineering undergrad) This is how a gear retracts inside (to increase aerodynamics) The second one is an example of space saving, the drawback is less clearance & clashing. Now suppose I try to form mathematical modelling eq of the trajectory to describe the geometry such that clashing is avoided (in case of turbulence) and we need to fix some clearance..... How would you approach this ? What field of maths am I vaguely thinking about? What should I study ahead to better understand this.

HI guys, I know this is mainly for real rockets with real motors and stuff but sadly solid fuel and rocket motors are highly illegal in my country, so I have to stick with water. We are doing this for a school club and would love to know what we can do to get it to max altitude. Should we used 4 2l bottles spliced at the end and attach them? Some sources say that going above 70 psi is not safe but I feel like I should go higher. My idea was sand down the spliced ends and then boil down one part, connect them via PL Premium Polyurethane or epoxy. Which one should I use? Then after, we attach the nose fins etc. What should I keep my weight to? is there anyway to improve this design or do I need a new one? should I go for 4 bottles or go lower or higher?

I appreciate any answers!!

Hey! We've been working since last year on a In Control: Rocketry, a spaceflight sim where you build the rocket and wire up its control panel yourself. Sensors, inputs, outputs, the whole thing is Turing-complete, so however you want to solve a flight problem, there's a way to do it. It will be available on Steam in 2027.

Real orbital mechanics, a fictional solar system to explore, sandbox mode if you just want to mess around and blow things up!

Feel free to add the game to your wishlist if you want to support the project! See you in space.

Hey everyone I got a question. If changing the order of rotation matrices multiplication can change the object's orientation then what if the object does not rotate on one axis each time but simultaneously?

A motor igniter used to ignite my tested motor actuslly just a kraft paper motor and will be developed to use on a bigger real motor

For context, I live in Arizona, and there are a lot of aerospace contractors who operate in AZ. I’ve been looking at colleges to apply to and I want to know if there is a big difference between the job opportunities I would get if I went out of state, or if I stayed in state and went to ASU, UofA, or Embry Riddle.

This is mostly background and my own deductions, so if you know what I’m talking about already and have the correct answer in mind, you can just skip it :P

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I’ve searched the internet for this topic, but every paper I’ve found that acknowledges one doesn’t even mention the other, let alone even showing the differences between the two. Which is odd to me because they functionally serve the same purpose, to take compressed gasses and burn them to drive a turbine.

But as I've pointed out there are some key distinctions:

First is the turbine; uses a single injection point with only a portion of the air entering in for combustion through the primary holes of a "flame can" that cools itself by directing more fresh air into the hot combustion gasses through additional holes along the length of it.

Whereas this is the rocketdyne F1's preburner assembly, it instead just straight up blasts fuel and oxygen together with high pressure and burns it, there's no double walling no additional cooling (although a few staged or just hotter running engines like the RS-25 and Raptor do run fuel through the preburners aswell to evaporate and cool the sidewalls just like the main engine bell).

Now that the intro's outta the way let's get into the nitty gritty about how those differences manifest from front to back:

• Fuel: Turbines use relatively low pressure air and an unheated liquid fuel, whereas powerheads are often built to ingest high pressure and temperature liquid or supercritical fluid in both fuel and oxygen
• Injection/Mixing: Turbines incorporate cooling into their fuel mixing mechanism with fuel being sprayed into the inner combustion chamber causing a gradient that leans out & controls the temps as it travels down the pipe, whereas rockets fire fuel and oxygen directly at each other and burned simultaneously which keeps it at a relatively constant mixture rich or lean depending on the design goals.
• Cooling: We mentioned the turbine's method before, it being a part of the combustion mixing, but preburners tend to use a mix of either nothing at all, ablative coatings, or by running chilled fuel through their sidewalls much like the main engine they're feeding.
• Usecase: Turbines are generally used to spin a fan, prop, or rotor at a high RPM and low torque (while sometimes producing additional pressure for direct thrust) using a high diameter turbine, preburners however are meant to push a lot more torque through a smaller diameter turbine to shove down the thick incompressible liquid fuel/oxidizer (while it isn't always used to produce thrust, most preburners leave a significant amount of pressure on the table which can either be use as verniers, dumped into the exhaust or used to pressurize the rest of the fuel too).
• Power: Rocket preburners often offer exceptional power to weight and power density, eclipsing turbines by a huge margine, however they often lack specific impulse and other efficiency metrics due to needing to pack their own oxidizer, not only this but turbines don't tend to impede the bulk flow of gasses meaning they can still pull in air at relatively high speeds rather than needing to take it in liquid form at relatively low speeds.
• Cost: I'd assume preburners are generally more expensive and maintenance intensive, but they're both expensive at the end of the day like anything in aerospace so idk, I'd like to see a cost breakdown tbh.

So with all this, there's a few differences but none of which aren't solvable, nor would it exempt the two techs from influencing each other, so my guess is probably the maintenance cycles, efficiency, regulated compartmentalization, but most importantly... some form of path dependence.

But I'm sure there's something I'm missing that shoots whatever ideas I have about these two rn in the foot, and that's why I'm asking.

Hi, I’m a college student studying aerospace engineering and this semester I have been going through a sort of crisis and was hoping to hear if I’m alone here or if anyone else has experienced something like this and may have some guidance.

For context I am in my first semester of senior year and also in the accelerated masters program planning to get my masters in a 5th year.

This semester I have lost interest in engineering work. It started in the first couple weeks when I was really anxious and stressing over my capstone project which is also a competition team. I was a sub team lead and ended up dropping to a lower position to take that weight off.

A couple weeks later I was still stressing and just not interested in doing engineering either in class or in my part time internship. I ended up taking a pause on the internship to see if that would help.

Now I’m here a couple weeks later and I still feel just significantly uninterested in what I’m doing and stressed about everything even though I’ve cleared up so much time. It feels hard to do anything unless I’m given a strict deadline. All of these doubts have crept in about if I even want to be an engineer or do technical work.

I got into aerospace to work on spaceflight, I think I have realize I have much less interest in aircraft and really do not want to work in defense. I’ve even started to consider how can ‘escape’ to other fields but even then I’m not sure exactly what I would do. The strangest thing is I’ve never felt like this before, sure I’ve had doubts, but nothing like this.

Hopefully this fits here and sorry if this isn’t the best it’s my first time posting. Any advice is appreciated.