Solidworks / FEA question

Say I have SW08, and I get Cosmos. Does Cosmos have the same non-backward
compatibility that SW has? More to the point, if I then get SW09, am I
forced to pay the maintenance to keep using Cosmos, if I don't have the
latest version. Or will an older version of Cosmos still work with a newer
version of SW?

TIA

 

I don't know SolidWorks official stance on this but I have used Cosmos
2005 with SW 2007 and it works.

 

Typically you can go back 2 versions of COSMOS, but the official
stance is that only the current versions of both are supported
together(via web site).

 

This is one of the big reasons I don't like the way CosmosWorks is
integrated with SW. I bought DesignStar which works, looks and feels
just like CosmosWorks but is standalone. It therefore also works with
SolidEdge and a number of other CAD packages and can even work with
CATIA. I also use Cosmos/M (which is not CosmosWorks) quite a bit
simply because it is fast, very capable and excels at the type of
models I need to make. Both these packages are standalone and pretty
much CAD independent. DesignStar will link to SW to get CosmosWorks
type integration of the geometry and Cosmos/M can really only pull in
dxf files reliably.

TOP

 

Actually Cosmos/M has all that CosmosWorks has and is in a way the map
to the future. Only thing is, I was using the "map" when it ran on
MSDos. For those familiar with FEA the pace at which SRAC has been
adding features to CosmosWorks is painfully slow.

For those that don't know, Cosmos/M was written originally to run on
DOS and Unix and was later ported to Windows95. Around that time SRAC
got the idea to go "Windoze" and came out with CW and DesignStar. It
was intended to be a poor man's ANSYS and fit the bill very well as a
full featured FEA package for analysts. It has one of the best command
line interfaces I have ever used.