Yavin Thruster

This video and paper outline a method for integrating real-world test results into design constraints for foam board gliders. The researchers built and flew many glider designs while collecting the data. They plug that data into the software and the user can see in real-time what the effects of their design changes have on the glider's trajectory.

One of the feature requests for CadQuery's FreeCAD module has been to add interactive parameters like there are on ParametricParts.com. This would basically tie a slider control to a variable so that you can slide it around to change parameters. Due to the nature of CadQuery (being Python-based and scripted), it's not beyond the realm of possibility that we could collect data from multiple variations of Yavin's thruster design and use that data to give the user real time feedback on both the theoretical and measured (but interpolated) characteristics of the thruster model.