Advanced Flight Simulation

OpenRocket offers more advanced options for simulating flight. You can plot your rocket’s predicted acceleration, climb, eject and landing, make a prediction for how far downrange and in which direction your flight will land, and even experiment with different models of Earth’s geometry, as it affects your flight. Once you’re satisfied with a sim, you can export your data for analysis and charting in other packages.

Plotting your rocket’s flight

To begin learning about OpenRocket’s plotting features, first, click the Plot / Export button on the Flight simulations window.

On the Edit simulation panel, you’ll see tabs marked Plot data and Export data.

Plotting data

The Plot data tab opens first. Here you can define many parameters that will determine what values are plotted, and what events are marked on the plot.

Here you’ll be able to quickly choose from a number of standard plots:

You’ll also be able to assign to the X and Y axes any one of over 50 parameters. If you click on the plot variable dropdown, you’ll see a search box and a list of variable categories. You can either scroll through the categories to find the parameter you want, or type in the search box to filter the list:

Select plot variable — Select a plot variable from the variable groups (left), or search for the desired variable (right).

The parameters are categorized in the following groups:

Time: Variables related to time
Position and Motion: Variables related to the position and motion of the rocket (e.g. altitude, position, velocity, acceleration)
Orientation: Variables related to the orientation of the rocket (e.g. pitch, yaw, roll)
Mass and Inertia: Variables related to the mass and inertia
Stability: Variables related to the stability of the rocket (e.g. CG, CP, stability margin)
Thrust and Drag: Variables related to the thrust and drag (e.g. thrust, TWR, drag)
Coefficients: Variables related to the calculation coefficients (e.g. normal force coefficient, roll moment coefficient)
Atmospheric Conditions: Variables related to the atmospheric conditions (e.g. air pressure, wind velocity)
Characteristic Numbers: Variables related to the characteristic numbers (e.g. Mach number, Reynolds number)
Reference Values: Variables related to the reference values (e.g. reference area, reference length)
Simulation Information: Variables related to the simulation information (e.g. simulation time step)
Custom: (User-defined parameters)

You can assign multiple parameters to the Y-axis, and choose whether their scales appear on the left, or the right side of the plot. You can add Y-axis parameters with the New Y-axis plot type button, or delete parameters from the plot with the X buttons. (The X-axis takes only a single plotted parameter, typically Time).

Additionally, you can choose from several flight events, any or all of which can be called out on your plot, in reference to the simulated time of occurrence.

Plotted results

Below you can see a plot of A simple model rocket, simulation number 4, flying on a C6-5. Note that the five events checked in the above screen have been marked on the plot (some very close to each other, or to the edge): Motor ignition, Motor burnout, Apogee, Recovery device deployment, and Ground hit.

You can also see that the three Y-axis parameters described above: Altitude, Vertical velocity, and Vertical acceleration appear as lines of three different colors.

As your rockets get more complex, with features like dual-deploy, air-start and multiple stages, your plots can grow in complexity to simulate their expected behavior. Below is a plot (from the example rockets) of a “High Power Airstart” rocket, modeled after a Patriot missile. The central motor starts on the launch pad, while the surrounding motors start while the rocket is in the air (hence, an “airstart”). The plot records the separate motor start events, and the deployment of both a drogue, and a main parachute.

A Plot of Sim #5 of the "High Power Airstart" example rocket.

Notice what’s happening in the plot above: The rocket is losing velocity - the blue line - before the airstart occurs. This is probably not what we want.

However, simulation number 3 of the same rocket, below, has an earlier airstart, and looks like it should work as expected. Looking at the slight wiggle in the velocity curve, we could also try another simulation to provide a little bit more margin for error.

A Plot of Sim #3 of the "High Power Airstart" example rocket.

Launch Conditions and Simulation Options

From the Plot data window, you can click the << Edit button to configure Launch conditions, and Simulation options before you plot.

Launch conditions

OpenRocket can simulate conditions at the launch site, so you can estimate how winds will direct your flight, and how far downrange your rocket will drift.

In the screen shown below, you can set parameters (and units) for wind, and for your Launch site, you can set the Latitude, Longitude and Altitude, as well as Atmospheric conditions. Note that Atmospheric conditions affect your rocket’s ascent velocity, as well as the local Speed of Sound.

This is also the panel where you can set the length of your launch rod or rail. This length will affect whether your simulation passes or fails, when it’s evaluated for minimum speed off the rod.

The Edit simulation window: Launch conditions.

Simulation options

In the Simulation options tab, the Simulator options let you choose the shape of the simulated Earth in your calculations (doing so does not affect the Earth background in Photo Studio), and you can choose the time-resolution of the simulation. This is also the place where you add and set up Simulation extensions, which are beyond this guide’s purpose.

Exporting Data

Located on the Plot / export panel, the Export Data tab (shown below) helps you set up a Comma-Separated Value (.csv) formatted file to export data from your simulations. You can export any or all of over 50 values (generally speaking, the list of parameters above, plus Coriolis acceleration). Optional Comments sections list any flight events (Apogee, for example) you selected for your simulation, as well as description and field descriptions.

You can choose separators other than comma, if you prefer semicolon, space, or TAB-delimited data. Once you have your data choices set up, clicking the Export button brings up a file dialog to choose a filename and location for your exported data.