Documentation

Loft's first described release. It covers what the tool can do today rather than every step that got it here — the per-change record starts from this entry.

Build and edit

• Build a rocket from scratch, or edit one you imported — the same surface, the same model, the same solver. *Start a new design* opens a stable 54 mm sport rocket already flying, rather than a blank slate.
• Add, remove, reorder and restack parts — body tubes, fin sets, transitions, mass objects, couplers, centring rings, motor mounts and booster stages. Every structural act is one undo step, named after the part it made.
• Edit the part you picked, on designs with several of a kind: click any tube, fin set, canopy or mass object on the diagram or in the parts list and the fields aim at *that* one, named. The selection survives a re-fly and a reload.
• Choose real commercial parts from a bundled catalogue — body tubes, nose cones, parachutes, couplers and centring rings, 2,990 parts across 13 vendors, with each vendor's own dimensions, material and part number. A part that does not fit is refused with the reason rather than flown at a size its vendor never published.
• Author a staged rocket and fly the separation.
• A design built in Loft leaves intact as an .ork file — geometry, materials, motor configuration and launch conditions — and reopens as itself.

Simulate and check

• Import the file you already have: OpenRocket .ork, RockSim .rkt, RASAero .CDX1.
• See more than one answer. Loft's own solver, the numbers the design file already stores from the tool that made it, and an in-browser RocketPy second opinion — presented side by side, with disagreement flagged rather than hidden.
• Sweep a motor selection, sweep a parameter, and run a Monte-Carlo dispersion — all in the browser, on your own machine.
• Per-set fin drag and a cited fin-flutter estimate (NACA TN 4197), with every shear modulus and every material density carrying its published source — or saying plainly that no published value exists.

The tool itself

• Distinct workspaces as real routes — import, design, flight, sweep, validate, docs — rather than one scrolling page.
• A touch-native phone layout, held to a 44 px hit target with no state reachable only by hover, and the three things a range day needs — pick a motor, check stability, sanity-check a delay — walked one-handed and offline.
• Installable and offline from the second visit, including the parts catalogue and the motor data.
• Everything runs on your device. No account, no upload, no tracking, no server. Free.

Honesty

• Every number is a prediction from a model, never a measurement and never a go/no-go. A value that is withheld says why and how to get it back; an extrapolated one says so; a reference figure names the tool that produced it and any caveat that tool attached.
• A candid, dated limitations log, a methods page linking every calculation to its published source, and a validation page with the measured accuracy against real design files.