projects / rocket-simulation.mdx

Ragnarok simulation

Small rocket simulation software in C++, with numerical integration and 3D live rendering.

Honestly, I am writing these lines with a bit of nostalgia... This project was a spin-off of my first-year bachelor C++ project, where we developed a spinning top simulation. It was 3 B.C. (Before Claude), and I now look at my readable, hand-written code with a lot of admiration... How did people with only rocks, trees and hammers build pyramids?? How did I code that??? "From the height of these pyramids, millennia look down upon you!"

I was in my rocket era, I was studying a lot so had no time to build real things like my previous Ragnarok rocket. I decided to built a software instead...

The simulator handles the basic mechanics of a rocket: gravity, friction, a wind profile, a propulsion profile and the full rigid-body mechanics pipeline (I was finishing my first-year mechanics course and I was pretty happy about it !). It is written in C++, with Qt for the 3D rendering. Don't ask me anything about Qt, I forgot how it works... But Claude apparently understood the architecture pretty well :

Architecture diagram of the rocket simulation: general/ physics core, Qt_GL/ 3D app and text/ console harnessArchitecture diagram of the rocket simulation: general/ physics core, Qt_GL/ 3D app and text/ console harness
Architecture of the project: a Qt-free physics core and two interchangeable frontends.
Live rendering of the simulated flight.

I will not go into more detail, as this is a fairly old project, but you can browse the code on my GitHub.

joseph-elf/RocketSimulationC++ · Qt