Yesterday, I was camping to watch the solar eclipse. Today, I'm back at school, diving into the material for senior year. My space-focused classes haven't met yet (updates on that front possibly tomorrow), but already the workload shaping up to be just as tough as last year's graduates warned us it would be.
The aerospace senior design classes focus on the AIAA Design Competitions. This year, the undergraduate individual aircraft request is to propose a Close Air Support (CAS) vehicle to replace the A-10. It's a shame Alex had to push back 521 a year, because this sounds right up his alley.
Our first assignment is Block 1 of a combined report, which will be due on Monday, September 11. By that point in time, we will have needed to have derived a mission profile from the specifications, reviewed the history of similar aircraft, and extrapolated from that data to perform the weight, wing, and powerplant sizing. All of it will naturally need to be summarized, formatted, and referenced.
On the subject of formatting, we've been given a few options for producing our reports. The standard approach is to use Microsoft Word, which has an unfortunate tendency to completely obliterate carefully-tweaked documents. Alternatively, we can use Adobe InDesign, which few of us know but allows for more meticulous curation. Because the design curve on InDesign is so steep, Dr. Barrett is offering some extra-credit for its use. LaTeX is also permitted, but will not garner any extra credit. I specifically taught myself LaTeX this summer to avoid the hassle of using MS Word this fall, so LaTeX it will probably be.
What we don't have a choice about is submitting our designs to competition. Knowing that these proposals will actually be judged may provide additional motivation to produce something decent. Or maybe adding pressure will only cause more problems. We'll just have to wait and see!
In either case, I should probably start reading. There's an awful lot to learn.
