What Loft is
Loft imports an OpenRocket .ork design and simulates its flight in your browser: apogee, velocity and Mach, stability margin, rail-exit speed, and recovery descent and drift. It runs entirely client-side — your design is never uploaded — and works offline once loaded.
Every number is an estimate from a model, not a measurement, and never a go/no-go verdict. The point of these docs is to make the model checkable: what each figure is computed from, where the model is known to be weak, and how far its output sits from OpenRocket's.
The three pages that matter
- Methods — every calculation linked to its published source: Barrowman stability, the drag buildup, the standard atmosphere, the motor and mass models, and the integrator.
- Limitations log — a candid, dated record of where the model is simplified or unvalidated. This is the most honest thing here.
- Validation — how Loft is checked: against first-principles physics, and against the OpenRocket results stored in a design.
There is also a plain FAQ for the common questions.
Safety posture
Loft follows the same rule as the rest of Fusion Space: surface the numbers honestly and let the flyer and the RSO decide. It shows stability margin, rail-exit velocity, apogee, and descent and drift, and it warns when a flight leaves the validated envelope (transonic/supersonic, marginal stability, low rail exit) — but it never tells you whether to fly. The motor's printed data and the range safety officer are always authoritative.
Keeping these docs current
These are living, author-maintained docs, versioned with the code. The project's rule: any change that adds or alters a calculation updates the Methods page and the Limitations log in the same change, and new validation runs feed the Validation page. If the docs and the code ever disagree, that's a bug — please report it.