Modeling of Geometry

As you build your aerospace vehicle simulations, you will be surprised at how much time you spend just getting the geometrical situation right. You have to keep track of vehicles in various coordinate systems. They may be moving along lines, and their proximity to certain planes may be of interest. Some of the vectors must be projected into new directions and others into planes. We may even have to deal with reflection and rotational symmetries.

Geometrical models will be with us throughout this book. In this section we build on the elements of tensor algebra and formulate such mundane things as lines, planes, and projections. Yet you will be surprised how different the invariant formulations are from the customary treatment.