Interplanetary, quite extraordinary craft

It's been a bit of a disjointed week for my geekery, lots of little bits and pieces.

Screenshots - Having had no luck with existing apps, I asked on the Raspberry Pi forums and the only suggestion I got was to use glReadPixels. This requires screenshot dumping code to be written into the app generating the framebuffer, which is perfectly doable and the code should just be boilerplate. With libjpeg to compress the raw pixels, it works a treat. I'm wondering if it's worth writing a standalone capture app, assuming that would actually work, or if a portable function is adequate, perhaps even better.

Freezes - Since I started doing more and more complex stuff with OpenGL ES 2.0 I've been getting regular freezes. These were so bad that everything locked up, the network died, no debug was dumped anywhere that I could see, even the keyboard died so the Magic SysRq keys were of no use. I was just about to start the old comment-things-out-one-at-a-time trick, when a Raspbian update was released and sort of fixed it. It now seems to run indefinitely without freezing, but sometimes the USB hub spontaneously dies even though the graphics still keep going. I've plugged my keyboard directly into the RPi now, and it seems to be OK.

3D modelling - While manually-constructed vertices are fine for hello triangle, they're not really feasible for bigger things. So I've downloaded Blender and started learning how to use it. It's not hard, there's just a lot to learn. Thankfully there are some excellent tutorials to get started with. The biggest problems I'm having are my lack of artistic ability, and trying to avoid making my alien craft look like anything from any movie or game I've seen. At the moment it looks like it came right out of Elite. I'll get better, hopefully.

Flight physics - For my anti-Defender (working title: "Offender", better suggestions welcome) the centrepiece is going to be the alien craft. When I think of the archetypal UFO, I think flying saucer - something which doesn't look terribly aerodynamic and just hovers in the air, better suited to interstellar travel than air-to-air combat. The kind of craft I'm picturing is based on that, but has been adapted to fly at speed in the earth's atmosphere. I want something which flies like nothing on earth, but obeys the same laws of physics that earthly craft are bound to and depend upon. I'm going to have to work out the physics with little-to-no knowledge of aeronautics. Here goes then...

Whereas a fixed-wing aircraft uses its wings to generate lift, the craft I picture will have some kind of anti-grav thing propelling it upwards. How would that behave differently to wings? It'd make lift more or less constant, not dependent on velocity or angle of attack, and there'd be no ceiling. The thrust would have to be manually varied with the angle of climb or descent or there'd be a kind of lift-induced drag - in a vertical cimb it'd fall backwards. Hinged ailerons or a rudder wouldn't be practical so the anti-grav would need to vary to generate pitch and roll. If there were multiple upwards anti-grav thrusters, then increasing thrust on one side while decreasing on the other should accomplish this and maintain stability. Yaw would require horizontal thrust, and maintaining the ability to roll in a vertical climb would require downward thrust.

With a half-decent physics model I think I can get that to work, and also have human aeroplanes, helicopers and missiles behaving with a moderate degree of relism. The trick is going to be getting the level of complexity right so it's accurate enough but isn't computationally intractable, especially if I want this to run on a Raspberry Pi. I'm hoping that by modelling a few simple laws of physics, higher level effects will just drop out - for example, modelling angle of attack should correctly should result in stalls. After thinking through the basics it's clear that the most difficult and important bit is going to be aerodynamics and drag.

When an aircraft stalls and tailspins, why does it turn into a nosedive? It can't be its weight distribution as net weight acts through the centre of gravity and imparts no torque. It's got to be drag. When an aircraft rolls, why does the roll not accelerate? It's got to be some kind of angular drag. Also, if my craft is going to be capable of entering the atmosphere from space, drag would determine how much heat gets generated. As I understand it, for an accurate drag model you need to be able to assess the drag coefficient for every possible angle of attack. I basically need a virtual wind tunnel. That's going to be fun... there's got to be a way to simplify it.

I'm kind of looking forward to trying this out, I don't think it would take a huge amount of effort to get to the stage where I have a craft (even if the model is just a placeholder), some control and some basic physics to try out. I'd need to provide some terrain for context if nothing else. No proper collision detection for a while - that's a whole new can of worms - but I should be able to add something which causes a splat or bounce at zero altitude. So far I'm still plucking bits of boilerplate from the stuff I've done so far, making it as generic and reusable as possible, and building up some library functions. Might as well do it properly from the start, eh?

And finally some linkage, as I thought this was pretty cool: Kindleberry Pi