On Sep 25, 11:25 pm, Airbus wrote:
In article .com,
says...
If someone were to being a (very long term) project to design a small
aicraft, on a budget, what software tool would be appropriate?

Is AutoCAD good enough or is there something more appropriate?

TIA,

AutoCad jocks like to say you can design ANYTHING with AutoCad, and you
probably can - but it is ceratinly not the best suited tool for aircraft
design. 3D design is not parametric in AutoCad, meaning that any
modification - even moving a screw hole to a different position -
requires a re-draw. That gets old really fast.

Arrgggg.....really?

I know virtually nothing about CAD, but IIUC, parametric modeling is
the one feature that a designer *would* want in this situation. Maybe
I misunderstand. Are you saying that in 3D renderings it is not
possible to create interdependencies based on arbitrary parameters?

The industry standard is of course Dassault's CATIA - but Scaled
Composites use Vellum (among others) and anything parametric with NURBS
modeling (Solidworks, Mechanical Desktop, Inventor, Pro-Engineer) will
work much better than plain AutoCad. These programs also interface more
easily through IGES to machine programs, to help you with prototyping and
manufacturing the thousands of individual parts you will need to draw in
your quest.

That helps, knowing what industry standard is, even if I never use it,
gives an idea of what state-of-art is so I know how much suffering to
expect.

I am a bit wary of AutoCAD. I remember back in the 1980's that its
popularity seemed to have more to do with its accessibility on a PC
than its stellar modeling capabilties. I had assumed that, overtime,
AutoDesk would take advantage or their market advantage and find a
more order for their own product, and not patchwork features
incrementally based on customer requests.

I recently tried out the latest version of AutoCAD on a friend's
computer for about 15-20 minutes, and while not getting too deep, it
had the same feel that it had back in 1987. This is not inherently
bad, but I *absolutely detest* comitting to a tool, only to find out
too late that it has serious structural flaws, bugs, artifacts of
modes of thought that have long since become antiquated but have been
kept for sake of backward compatibility....and customer support rep
telling you after you spend hours finding discovering flaws yourself
"it's ok, ever user has to suffer this way...it's a rite of
passage.." ...GRRRRR!...

I suspect that there might be a younger company who recognized
opportunity in doing what AutoDesk might or might not have corrected,
and did it right with something smaller, leaner, cleaner, faster,
perhaps not as full-featured, but not as burdened with the
responsibility of backward compatibility. I just don't know which
product this is. The marketing message put forth by SolidWorks makes
me think it might be it...but I don't have a clue..

...and yes, I would very nice to have something to interface with IGES.

-Le Chaud Lapin-