pyflightstream

Version-aware, didactic Python driver for the FlightStream panel-method solver. Successor of the author's legacy research scripts. MIT licensed.

Status: v0.2.0 is public on PyPI with the archived release on Zenodo (DOI recorded in CITATION.cff). Development continues toward v0.3.0; CHANGELOG.md carries the release history.

pip install pyflightstream

A first taste, no solver required (build time is where errors surface):

from pyflightstream.commands import CommandNotInVersionError
from pyflightstream.script import Script

script = Script(version="26.12")  # the FlightStream version is explicit input
script.emit("NEW_SIMULATION")
script.emit("IMPORT", "METER", "STL", "wing.stl", clear=True)
script.emit("SOLVER_SET_AOA", 4.0)
script.emit("START_SOLVER")
print(script.render())  # validated ASCII script, ready for the solver

try:
    Script(version="26.0").emit("SOLVER_SET_AOA", 4.0)
except CommandNotInVersionError as error:
    print(error)  # refused: no recorded evidence for that version

The worked examples in examples/ take it from here to executed polars, campaigns, and coupled aeroelastic runs.

Optional extras: [fsi] (aeroelastic coupling, PyNiteFEA), [geom] (probe-survey geometry gating, trimesh/rtree/scipy), [plot] (matplotlib for the plotting examples).

Why this package

FlightStream is scripted through an ASCII command file, and the solver is under active development: the FlightStream team is responsive to user requests and works with intermediate hotfix builds that consolidate into stable releases. A fast-moving solver naturally means a scripting command set that evolves from version to version, faster than any single document can track. This package makes the FlightStream version an explicit input: every command it emits is validated against a per-version command database, and old versions are only ever added, never dropped, so campaigns stay reproducible across that evolution.

Every database entry carries a manual page citation, and its status per version (documented, verified, broken) can only be promoted by citing a committed probe report from a licensed machine. Nothing is guessed; the honest gaps are reported as such.

What ships

• Command database with per-version evidence and a manual citation on every entry, browsable offline via pyflightstream.help() (including a manual-coverage section) and as a generated docs site; the compatibility matrix carries the live counts.
• Validating script builder with curated helpers: phase ordering, didactic refusals at build time, entity labels (recipes can name frames, actuators, motions, and boundaries instead of raw indices), and a solver-setup provenance snapshot recording the effective value of every solver flag per run.
• Campaign workspace: an input-artifact library (references, solver presets, boundary groups, geometries, profiles, executables by build id), a run manifest as the single identity authority, output naming templates, campaign pre-flight with zero solver time, and resumable incremental sweeps.
• Runner and parsers: headless execution, anchor-based parsers for the solver outputs, and a pandas table layer (per-result tables, one wide row per run, whole-sweep DataFrame straight from the manifest).
• Run-matrix support as a first-class interface: read, convert, pre-flight, and run the pipe-delimited 15-column matrix format.
• Far-field probe surveys (planar grids, geometry gating, VTK/Tecplot writers, conservation ledgers on xarray) and an aeroelastic coupling subpackage (structural beam, coupled driver, replay harness).
• Architecture overview from the live module docstrings via pyflightstream.overview().
• Predictable surfaces: a declared-options registry (pyflightstream.options), one public exception catalog (pyflightstream.exceptions), test assertions with quantified reports (pyflightstream.testing), and the house conventions rendered by help().

Command-line tools

Supported FlightStream versions

Registered: 26.000, 26.100, 26.120 (canonical 26.XXX scheme; the last digit indexes vendor hotfix builds). The ordered list in src/pyflightstream/commands/_meta.yaml is the only ordering authority. Evidence is strongest on 26.120 (probed on a licensed machine); 26.100 is partially backfilled from the manuals; the 26.000 column is honestly empty until probed. The compatibility matrix in the docs is generated from the database at build time.

What is each folder?

Development setup

pip install -e .[dev,fsi,geom]
pre-commit install
pytest

Tier 1 (the pytest suite) runs anywhere. Tier 2 (command validity probes) and Tier 3 (physics regression) require a local FlightStream license and are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md. The docs build with properdocs build --strict.

License

MIT. Contributions must be original or MIT-compatible; code derived from the AGPL pyFlightscript package is not accepted. See CONTRIBUTING.md.