Design decision tree | General | Forum

Post edited 8:17 pm – February 18, 2010 by Luke Maurits

I have created an OHKLA Design Tasks page in the Wiki.  It is the beginning of an effort to get all the individual "design" tasks involved in OHKLA arranged into a hierarchical tree structure.

I propose that eventually every leaf node in the tree should have associated with it:

• A very short (say <= 160 char) summary just to make the tree easy to navigate and meaningful to the interested non-technical reader
• A brief document outlining what we need and with a roughly list of informal requirements – not necessarily absolute numbers but rather "must be able to withstand x", etc.
• A formal requirements list which turns the descriptions in the above document into an exactly list of hard numbers.
• A document outlining all the available choices for each design decision

This should be enough to facilitate making our decisions, right?  Eventually all of this can go into a system like Project Open or Redmine, but the Wiki should suffice for now (since it may be a while before we (i) choose some software and (ii) get it set up).

If people feel like this is an adequate approach then I am happy to start writing some of the above documents for the propulsion part of OHKLA.  I feel like I have done enough reading on hybrid rocketry to at least make a start.  The documents can always be improved upon later.

In fact, this tree will be a great boon in that whenever somebody new with important skills turns up, we can point them at the tree and say "feel free to do any work at all on any of the documents for any of the leaves that are within your field" and then they have clearly defined work to do.  If we emphasise that "anything is better than nothing" then people shouldn't feel too afraid to replace empty documents with rough outlines.

Once all of the points above are considered complete for any one leaf node we can make the decision by having people read all the documents and vote.

Feel free to expand the tree, it is obviously not fully complete at the moment.  Also, if we think this is a good approach, we can start on a similar tree for CLLARE.

I am very glad you liked the comment! :)  Your avionics stuff seems fine so far.  It is easy to improve things as we go along so we should follow Wikipedia's "be bold!" philosophy for now and just write whatever we can, it doesn't matter if things aren't perfect.

I will try to write up some propulsion stuff tomorrow, plus whatever else I feel like I can make a decent contribution to.

I have done a little work on the grain geometry page.

More importantly, I have expanded the template of the pages a little by adding a "Background" section after the brief description, and by adding a "Supporting Materials/Calculations" section at the end.  In this last section we can add a wide range of material and/or links to material relevant to the decision, making the template pretty flexible.

I'll try to get a bit of reading on ignition options done over the weekend so I can create a skeleton for that page too.

Once most of the general groundwork for the tree is done, I think it would be a good idea to directly solicit help from appropriate-seeming amateur rocketry clubs/groups, where by appropriate-seeming I mean those which (i) have large hybrid rocket experience (ii) seem positively inclined toward open source.