Project HOPE-X spaceplane

[Pipcard]

Current status:

The top half of the fuselage, the bottom half of the fuselage/wings, and the top half of the wings are still separate meshes. They are not connected/fused yet (that process will probably involve recreating parts of the mesh)

 

[Donamy]

It's like a drug, isn't it ?

 

[Loru]

Pretty good job Pipcard. :thumbup:

 

[IronRain]

:hesaid:

 

[Donamy]

Wait til you get to the windows.

 

[Pipcard]

There are no windows on HOPE-X because it is an unmanned vehicle.

 

[Donamy]

That's lucky ! Doors or hatches ?

 

[Pipcard]

Payload bay doors, but that's it.

 

[Interceptor]

Nice job so far Pipcard.:thumbup:

 

[Pipcard]

I've managed to fuse the fuselage & wings together (top & bottom = after & before, respectively). This was mostly accomplished by using the "bridge" function to bridge each part of the mesh. I had to tweak some parts, because the bridge function works by connecting the vertices of two faces, and they have to have the same amount of vertices in order for it to work.

p.s. it wasn't as simple as "bridge left upper wing section to fuselage"; I had to break it up into multiple chunks (mostly lengthwise and heightwise) in order to bridge them together.

---------- Post added at 10:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:40 PM ----------

There's an issue that I want to bring up before it's too late.

HOPE-X was supposed to land at Christmas Island "because of its geographic and climatic advantages, and also because NASDA has a rocket and satellite tracking station there... The candidates in Japan - including Magejima Island in Kagoshima Prefecture as well as Tono and Kamaishi in Iwate Prefecture, were ruled out due to overcrowded airspace and the necessity for space shuttles to fly over China and the Korean Peninsula to land..." (source)

There's a problem... we currently don't have a Christmas Island add-on for Orbiter 2010.

Orbiter 2014 (beta screenshot shown below) will have Christmas Island, but there's a couple of problems:

Clouds. That, and a need to have a flat area in the terrain data, in order to have the (currently existing) landing strip there (it is in the upper right corner).

 

[Loru]

Clouds are not the problem. They can be removed with some photoshop/gimp/paint.net work. As for second problem I'd wait till someone develops import/export tool for terrain data (for example to msh or other 3d format or even greyscale bitmap).

As far as I know there are experients in progress to pack all textures and terrain data into bigger files using RAR compression that'd be extracted on the fly by simulator (to speed up disk I/O and reduce file size). I'm not sure about current progress of them.

 

[Urwumpe]

I have an algorithm for converting DEM data into a mesh with defined quality (number of faces or maximum height error) ... but do we really need this one now, that the new Orbiter version is climbing above the horizon?

 

[Pipcard]

Did you know that I made a request for this over three years ago?

 

[Urwumpe]

Did you know that I made a request for this over three years ago?

And now you can do it yourself. Exactly like you want it to be. Isn't that much cooler than just making a request for it? :thumbup:

 

[Donamy]

Did you know that I made a request for this over three years ago?

About time you answered a request. :lol:

:j/k:

 

[Pipcard]

 

[Capt_hensley]

There are no windows on HOPE-X because it is an unmanned vehicle.

Well, No windows for humans. I saw a variant with a camera window at the Apex of what would be the cockpit. IIRC they removed it in favor of FLIR, and DLIR style radar bays covered with tiles opaque to the radar. Don't quote me, I still have to re-find the research on this.

 

[Pipcard]

Tried to add main engines and RCS thrusters.

It was based on this image (© JAXA).

What I try to do is measure the pixels in Inkscape, and work off of that. Or just eyeball it (I don't like eyeballing when I'm trying to recreate something).

 

[PhantomCruiser]

The engines and thruster assemby look pretty sweet. The vertical stabs look a little thick though. Nice job so far, keep up the good work.

I really can't find any pictures that have a good view of the vertical stabs, so I guess just do what makes you feel good. :thumbup:

 

[Donamy]

According to the pic, the wings need to be "stubbier". IMO