OpenMDAO / OpenMDAO/Aviary

Additional detail for modelling

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#910 2 comments 0 reactions 2 assignees View on GitHub

@cmbenne3 is already working on this.

Since Feb 17, 2026.

documentation
Dominant language
Python
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Avg merge
6d 14h
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Desired documentation content.

Hi,
Like most people new to Aviary, I'm interested to try and optimise some parameters around a new aircraft design. Particularly I am also interested to see what mission profiles might be possible. However the modelling metadata is a bit tough to crack. The documentation is not that detailed and in particular, many of the unitless metrics are not well documented.. for example positioning units for wings, engines and loads.

Is there any existing documentation on your requested topic? Please describe.

There is the model metadata page, but that doesn't have complete descriptions of all the unitless numbers used.

Whilst looking around I found OpenVSP https://openvsp.org/ which is a visual parametric modeller for aircraft. It would be great to integrate that system to produce modelling files for aviary. It might require some sort of export script from openVSP to aviary.

Alternatively or in addition, what would be good is some tutorials that produce a model from scratch much like those on openvsp ground school:
https://vspu.larc.nasa.gov/

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