OrbitX

Screen shot of the OrbitX Flight Module from June 2020.

OrbitX is a software package developed by Patrick Melanson and collaborators, as a remake of Dr Magwood's Orbit software. OrbitX is coded in Python in contrast to Orbit's FreeBasic.

The full Orbit suite simulates the flight of the Habitat, as well as its environmental and electrical subsystems. As of June 2020, OrbitX has remade the flight code and the networking code, which allows OrbitX's flight module to interact with the modules of OrbitV.

OrbitX is still under development, and contributors are directed to the github repo.

History

The OrbitX was conceived by Patric Melanson, as a way to make the Orbit suite modular and more easily maintainable. He recruited collaborators Ye Qin, Kyoung, and Sean from his CS 493/494 course at the University of Waterloo complete the project. The completed project was presented at the Final Year Design Project Symposium in March 2019.

Patrick demoed the project to Spacesim members and alumni on June 19, 2020. The self-described "janky" demo showed the OrbitX flight module, how the module could be connected to the existing Orbit Engineering software, and how save-files are now in the easily readable json format.