Airspeed and altitude are set on the axes around the scene, or by dragging the dot between them.
Attitude
Fly it yourself
Controls
Keyboard: W/S pitch, A/D roll, Q/E yaw; hold Shift for faster rates. Mouse: while flying, left-drag is the stick and right-drag orbits the camera. Gamepad: left stick pitch and roll, right stick yaw. The artifact viewer may block gamepads; opening the page in its own tab avoids that.
Manoeuvres
Entry timeline
How the timeline works
Each event fires once, in order, when its condition is met: at entry, after a time, once braking reaches a number of g, below a Mach number or altitude, or at the top of a skip. It sets a new bank angle and, optionally, a new angle of attack. The vehicle turns towards them at 5Β° per second in bank and 1Β° per second in angle of attack, as a real one would, so a roll reversal passes through wings-level and briefly lifts the vehicle. Lift and drag at each angle of attack come from analyses of the actual shape at β10Β° to 60Β°. The profiles are representative of the published Shuttle and Artemis I entries, not flight data. This is a planar model: bank sets how much lift points up, not the turn, so cross-range isn't computed.
Playing the entry steps through the trajectory faster than real time. The axes, flowfield Mach, attitude and heating follow it; the heating map uses the conditions at each moment.
Reading results while moving
Time runs in flow-throughs: the time air takes to pass one body length. Real fighter manoeuvres take about 5β20; shorter durations exaggerate the lag of separated flow, which shows as a wider loop in the lift trace. At low speed the surface moves with the body. The high-speed flowfield treats motion as a series of steady states, and the heating and entry results update when the motion stops.
The flow patterns are meaningful while moving; the force numbers during fast motion are rough. Air swept up or released by the moving body isn't counted in the force yet, which reads drag low during a rapid pitch-up. Hold an attitude for a flow-through or two before reading loads.
Exhaust plumes are solved by the high-speed flow solver, above Mach 0.6. Low-speed jets come with the landing work.
Chamber conditions
Layout
How engines are modelled
Each nozzle is ideal-rocket theory: frozen, isentropic, one-dimensional flow from the chamber to the exit area ratio, which gives exit Mach number, pressure, velocity and mass flow. Real engines lose a few per cent; the presets are representative, not certified data. In the flow solver each exit plane is a source boundary that injects that exit state, so the plume, its shock cells, base pressure and any interaction with the airframe are solved. The exhaust is carried as the solver's gas with the true exit density, velocity and pressure, so mass flow, momentum and pressure are right, while its temperature and sound speed follow air's properties. For an aerospike only the primary nozzle is modelled this way; the spike is geometry, so its thrust appears in the surface pressure. Thrust shown here is the nozzle exit thrust; pressure on the spike and base adds to it through the force coefficients.
