The possibilities for a bit of solar sailing are the most interesting new feature in Orbiter 2010, for me. It's got me thinking about just what the optimum attitude for the sail is for reducing/expanding it's orbit. And what would the logistics be for an attitude control system using the "steering paddles" ? etc. etc.
I suggest, a "solar sail autopilot" must hold determined angle to sun, and work properly even on high time accelerations (x100 or even x1000).
IEATMFD will hold the vessel attitude relative to velocity vector at high time accelerations, but it works by setting the vessel attitude mathematically so you may think that is "cheating" - depends on what you want to do with the simulation.
I looked through the code a few nights ago to move the docking port to the far end of the sail and noticed all the interesting stuff in the code. It looks to me all that is missing is some way to activate the paddles. They are animated and there is code that changes the force on the sail. i didn't dive deep enough to see if it was all active, plus the math in there is way over my head and coding abilities
Yes, it looks like it just needs some key commands to set the paddle rotations. Anyone have the time to fix it?
Cheers,
Brian
---------- Post added at 11:06 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:50 AM ----------
vonneuman - thanks for the link to that .pdf, at a quick glance it looks like it answers a lot of my questions about solar sailing :thumbup:
Good luck with your project, if you get into the OrbiterAPI, you can see that you can access just about any parameter for a vessel from an MFD, no problem.