Landing gear

(The Khrest from Perry Rhodan. Artwork by Ingolf Thaler. From Perry Rhodan Nr 278, 16 December 1967. From Winchell Chung's Atomic Rocket.)

There's a plague going around at work; I eventually succumbed. Being sick for a few days has given me the opportunity to spend a bit more time working on my lunar lander program. I have been studying a couple of 2D physics engines (Chipmunk and Box2D) because I want to add rigid-body dynamics to it.

I'd already done a previous lunar rover test with Chipmunk (it comes with a rover sample) so I added a round rocket to that to try and figure out how to design the landing gear:



In this landing gear, the upper strut is a shock absorber, while the lower strut is just a swing arm. The foot's orientation is locked to the swing arm. This is OK, but the feet are forced to slide outward as the rocket comes to rest. If they hit an immovable obstacle there is an abrupt shock to the rocket. Ideally the feet would not have any lateral force but I haven't been able to come up with a geometry for that, short of just having some pistons sticking straight down out of the rocket. Adding some shock absorption capability to the lower struts would help.

I have decided to try and use Box2D (possibly modified to use my own vector class) instead of Chipmunk. That will take some time to install. Neither engine deals with BSPs so I will probably initially represent the planet with a collection of convex polygons (which will likely take a fair amount of memory), and add support for BSPs later.