Hi everybody,

Some context: I'm trying to simulate ropes stopping a 115 meters ship being launched sidewise into a flip tank. The sliding launch and the flip sim are working well but once in the water the ship keeps going, out of inertia, when a real ship would get stopped by tugboats before going too far - see this reference [www.youtube.com].

I therefore thought: maybe I can just tie the ship to some initially slack ropes that stop it from going beyond some distance?

Attached is a simpler scene with a couple of single-cable sims I made to experiment a little, one based on a chain of RBDs, the other using a WireSolver instead.

The first approach is the more successful of the two but the weight I put at one end of the rope is unrealistically light. Anything heavier makes the rope behave correctly on a large scale but erratically at the level of the individual points.

The second approach doesn't work at all. For whatever reason I haven't been able to attach one end of the wire to the falling weight. I tried with the WireGlueConstraint and, separately, with a ConstraintNetwork and a number of different constraint relationships.

Can somebody take a look and let me know where I'm doing it wrong?