Thermal are either stationary, fixed, always triggering at the same spot. Like a quarry, or a fire, or some gully in a hully with the sun shining into it and facing into wind.
Or we get flatland drifting thermals. They travel along on the ground downwind with a certain speed.
Black Line is a stationary thermal.
White Line is a drifting thermal
Cursor position is "cloud=base". 2 Paragliders leaving at the same time.
Each Paraglider got 3 lines, trimspeed, speed 2 fly and maximum, full bar speed
Red Glider, red line is trimspeed, orange is speed to fly, yellow is maximum speed
Blue Glider , blue line is trim speed , magenta is speed to fly, green is maximum speed
Java 1.4 has to be installed, download from java.sun.com
Download the catch.jar file into some new created directory.
mkdir C:\tmp\test ... for example
Use jar -xvf catch.jar or a zip utility to unzip the catch.jar file.
cd C:\tmp\test
jar -xvf catch.jar
Copy from the appletcode the wingdata.xml and dtd file one higher up into your new created directory.
cp appletcode\wingdata.* .
And start the code
C:\tmp\test>java appletcode/Best/Catch/CatchThermal.class
Then modify the wingdata.xml file and add your glider data to it.
The wingdata.xml file format
PolarCount can be 3 or 4 or 5 for the amount of polare points
The first point has to be the minimum sink point. Where the polare tangent is horizontal.
The next points have to points on the polare as the speed increases.
The last point is the top speed on the polare.
A point is defined by the speed in km/h and a sinkvalue im m/s
The sample data provided is based on the info available from
http://parapente.para2000.free.fr/wings/index.html
The wingdata.xml file format
<Wing WingId="Effect38-3" Name="Effect38 3 Points" Span="9.93" MinSpeed="22"
TrimSpeed="37">
<PolarData PointCount="3">
<PolarPoint Speed="30." Sink="-1.15" />
<PolarPoint Speed="36." Sink="-1.31" />
<PolarPoint Speed="50." Sink="-2.9" />
</PolarData>
</Wing>
WingId has to be unique, no 2 wings can have the same Id
Name can be anything you choose, a long string that explains a bit more
Span is the projected ( not the flat) wing span
MinSpeed would be stall speed
TrimSpeed is toggles up and no accellerator applied
PointCount can be 3 or 4 or 5 for the amount of polare points
The first point has to be the minimum sink point. Where the polare tangent is
horizontal.
The next points have to points on the polare as the speed increases.
The last point is the top speed on the polare.
A point is defined by the speed in km/h and a sinkvalue im m/s
Polar data info you find at
http://www.para2000.org/wings/index.html
The code has also been integrated with T3D2
http://sourceforge.net/projects/t3d2
http://t3d2.sourceforge.net/
Known bugs :
Not very robust code, do not deviate and experiment with different input format.
The code will freeze up your computer.
5 point polare go wobbly, having dents, typical behaviour of a spline curve as the degree goes up