Surface finish in open rocket?

[bjphoenix]

I was searching options and found in the components I can specify various types of surface finish. I primer my rockets, then sand, then spray on color from spray cans. I'm assuming that "regular paint" would be appropriate for this, is that correct? Also I choose "rounded" for the fin profiles since that's what I typically do.

I've noticed that for a couple of Rocksim files I downloaded and opened in OR I found that the "aircraft sheet metal" option was used for finish. I don't know the implication for this type of finish and I wonder if this is a bug or slight incompatibility in the conversion from rocksim to open rocket.

 

[lakeroadster]

I was searching options and found in the components I can specify various types of surface finish. I primer my rockets, then sand, then spray on color from spray cans. I'm assuming that "regular paint" would be appropriate for this, is that correct?

Sounds like what I do... well done

 

[neil_w]

You can be the judge of whether your paint is “smooth” or “regular” as a starting point.

Mostly, surface finish is used as a quick way to tweak the drag coefficient for the whole rocket to tune the sim after measuring some accurate flights. Of course, now we also offer the ability to directly override Cd as well, but that’s a recent addition.

Now, about the strange-seeming “aircraft sheet metal” setting. We found that one of the surface existing finish settings was labeled one way but the value being used was not correct according to industry-standard tables. The value being used in the program was listed as “aircraft sheet metal” in those tables. So, for existing sims that use the old value, we keep the value but give it the correct name. It comes out looking weird but it’s the most correct way we could think to handle it.

Now, the values used for all the available surface finishes correspond to the standard tables.