Don’t forget to register for the OpenVSP Workshop. August 4-6 in Daytona Beach Florida.

Mostly fixes, but a few creature comforts that may quality as features if these issues were causing you irritation.

More options when placing Stack XSec’s. There is now an ‘Abs’ mode for position/orientation of cross sections. These are in the Stack’s coordinate system (not the global coordinate system). This should make it easier to build up bodies in certain circumstances.

Stack XSec’s also gained an option to change their vertical alignment. Setting the VAlign Parm to -1 will cause the XSec origin to be at the bottom of the section (+1 at the top, and 0 at the center like it is now). So, if you are designing a body with a flat bottom, set VAlign for those sections to -1 and you should have an easier time of it.

The Planar Slice tool now ignores inlet/exhaust extensions when automatically setting the bounds for slicing. It will also ignore landing gear ground planes and Aux Geoms intended to extend beyond the model.

I noticed that changing XSec type was slower than I felt like it should be. I profiled it and made a few nice speedups, but it was still sluggish. I then realized that the slowdown was caused in 3.41.0 by some changes I made to preserve ID’s when changing XSec type. I was able to make an algorithmic change to this routine and now it is back to full speed.

File/New will now pop up a dialog to give you the opportunity to save or discard your changes.

There is now an aspect ratio control for 3D background images. If your images are not 1:1, this should make life easier.

There is now an option to not show the colored dashed lines indicating the designated propulsion station locations.

When doing a discrete View From visibility analysis, the FOV of any viewpoints is not taken into account.

Several bug fixes that have hit users. FEA Structures are now Update()’d when exporting STEP/IGES files via the API. A bug setting up the slices for Planar Slice (introduced in 3.50) has been fixed.

There was a mistake calculating the torsional stiffness constant for rectangle beam sections could actually cause an infinite loop and crashes. While fixing it, I also noticed that the torsional stiffness for box sections with un-equal wall thickness had an error.

Also, a build fix for shiny new GCC – thanks fernape.

So, nothing too huge, but pretty good for a .2 release. Everyone should update.

Features:

• Planar slice auto bounds now ignores components meant to extend beyond model
• Absolute XSec positioning for Stacks
• Vertical alignment of XSecs for Stacks
• File/New now has confirmation dialog
• Aspect ratio control for 3D Background images
• Show/Hide engine definition station highlights
• Discrete View From visibility analysis now honors limited FOV

Fixes:

• FEA Structure Update() when exporting STEP/IGES via API
• Planar Slice limits fixed
• Torsional constant for rectangle beam sections – causing infinite loop
• Torsional constant for box beam sections
• Build fix with new compilers / libc++