BRL-CAD? | Project management | Forum

I know that people have already suggested that we are not going to be able to avoid going with a proprietary CAD solution because none of the open source ones are up to the task at hand, but I got a comment on an old post in /r/tothemoon yesterday which has made me wonder if that is really the case.

Is anybody here familiar with BRL-CAD?  It is a solid modelling CAD system that was created in the 1970s by the US Army's Ballistic Research Lab (hence BRL).  It has been worked on continuously since then and even today it is the standard CAD system used by the US Army, Air Force and Navy.  The Reddit comment I got pointing it out also said it was used by NASA.  There is nothing on the BRL-CAD website to suggest this, but some googling seems to reveal that a lot of people think the same, so there may be truth in it.  Anyway, BRL-CAD was made open source in 2004 and is now freely available for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, BSD and Solaris, which is a pretty wide range of platforms.  I don't know enough about CAD to really judge for myself how good it is at what it does but (i) googling for reviews of it seems to suggest that most people find it pretty impressive and (ii) I'm sure something that the US military has used and worked on for 30 years couldn't be bad.  It seems like it can produce some pretty impressive stuff to me.  The website says that it has some features specifically for ballistics-related analysis of models, which could be really handy for us.

I feel like it would be so much better for us to be able to stick to a strict open-source software suite, in terms of drawing attention to ourselves and fostering a sense of identity, that I would be hesitant to rule it out too soon.  Are we certain we couldn't get by without proprietary CAD software?  I know the last time we had this conversation someone suggested that there were no good open source packages for finite element analysis, but Wikipedia has a fairly lengthy list of free FEA packages.  Are we sure that none of them will meet our needs?  Another thought: I don't think it would be violating the spirit of CSTART if we were to use some of the money we raised to put bounties on specific open source software problems.  If we were to say to the authors of one of those FEA packages which was not up to our needs in some small way that we'd give them $250 and mention how great they are on our website if they added a few key features , we'd probably get a good response.

Rocket-To-The-Moon said:

This looks interesting. I totally agree that it would be ideal for us to use an open source CAD suite. The  biggest problem is that means that all of our engineers would have to learn new software. That could create a large barrier to some.

This is a valid concern, although I'm not sure the problem is necessarily limited to open source solutions.  We really want to standardise on a single CAD solution and even if we choose a proprietary one, there will be plenty of engineers who have only used another, different proprietary CAD solution.

The SketchUp physics plugin looks nice.  My biggest concern with SketchUp is that there is no Unix version, which would be a deal breaker for a large number of geeks.