Solutions
Systems design decides what a system is made of, what each part does and what it must satisfy, and then says almost none of it in metres and kilograms. The blocks have no size, the budgets live in a spreadsheet, and the architecture is agreed long before anything can check whether it physically works. That gap, inside systems design itself, is what MBEstudio closes.
MBEstudio is a systems design tool that happens to be three-dimensional, not a CAD package that happens to hold requirements. Being clear about that boundary is more useful than claiming the whole lifecycle.
Nothing above rules out using it alongside those tools. It rules out using it instead of them, which is a different and more honest claim.
| Tool | Answers | What MBEstudio adds |
|---|---|---|
| CAD (CATIA, SolidWorks, Onshape) | Will it manufacture? Will it assemble? | Answers earlier, before the geometry is worth that effort, and answers power, coverage and traceability, which CAD does not. |
| MBSE (Cameo, Capella, SysML) | What are the functions, states and interfaces? | Puts the architecture in metres and kilograms. A SysML block has no envelope, so it cannot interfere with anything. |
| Requirements tools (DOORS, Jama) | What did we say we would do? | Makes a budget requirement executable, so “shall not exceed 43,000 kg” is checked continuously rather than at review. |
| Spreadsheets | What is the mass and power roll-up? | The same roll-up, derived from geometry that also has to pass clearance, so it cannot silently disagree with the layout. |
| FEA / CFD | Will it survive? Will it cool? | A screen that tells you which pairs are worth meshing, at a stage where meshing would be premature. |
An avionics upgrade, a new antenna or a sensor fairing on an existing airframe lives or dies on weight, the length of the runs back to the avionics bay, and what the fuselage and wings block. MBEstudio carries the host aircraft as reference geometry that occludes but is excluded from the mass budget, so the numbers are about your modification while the blocking is about the whole aircraft.
Mass and centre of gravity are not budgets on an air or sea vehicle, they are constraints on whether it flies or floats level. The CG envelope constraint checks a box in world coordinates on every drag, and the inertia tensor is there when the controls team asks for it.
Fitting compute, power and thermal into a box is a clearance problem, a heat-density problem and a harness problem at once. Treating them separately is what produces a layout that passes three reviews and fails on the bench.
Three architectures with three sets of measured numbers, in the time it usually takes to agree the spreadsheet format. Cheap models get built early, and early models are the ones that still change decisions.
A project is a single JSON file, which makes the integration story unglamorous and reliable: it goes in version control next to the rest of the programme, it diffs, and it reviews like code. The Markdown review pack drops into a review package; the BOM CSV goes to whoever owns procurement; the PNG goes in the slide.
Because the file is the whole of the work, there is no server to stand up before two engineers can trade a model, and no state trapped in an application that a colleague cannot open.
