We seem to be moving through the available methods of computational aerodynamics at quite a pace recently with this, and the work that Victor has been done.
After a fair amount of investigation into the available methods I've settled upon using OpenVSP - which has both a geometrical vehicle modeller, a vortex lattice method solver and (since 3.9.1) a flat panel solver. My results are from the VLM solver.
OpenVSP is really powerful, and there is a lot to understand about how to drive it. The geometrical approach is well suited, and fits well with VSPAero. I started off modelling by trying to get something that was close to the real thing, but now I'm modelling to what works well with VSPAero (i.e. the degenerate geometry).
The approach taken to validate OpenVSP was to build an F-15 aero model and compare that against the wind tunnel data, and to see how close I can get it. This worked reasonable well, although some data is a little different, but probably ok.
After the F-15 I've built a BAe Hawk T2 model which flys quite nicely, but isn't finished.
More recently there is the Beagle Pup project. This is intended to be a comparitive exercise with Simon "bomber"'s Pup model - to see which approach produces the best results.
I've written up my findings (based around the Beagle Pup) in an article on my site http://chateau-logic.com/content/using- ... flightgear
The Beagle Pup took nearly 40hours of CPU at 100% to run, however it seems to fly quite nicely[1]
The FlightGear model can be downloaded from the page listed above, as can the aerodata plots.
I would appreciate testing and feedback
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[1] Usual disclaimer applies; in that I've never flown one in real life so it might turn out to be quite unrealistic.