Importing whole aircraft into Star
 

My research topic is on CFD of the KC-135R stratotanker. I got the model from http://www.3dvia.com/models/D9533DCF...media-comments and converted the .dae file to .stl so that Star could open it.

Now, what would be the easiest way to edit the model in order to remove unnecessary features, such as the landing gear? I tried importing into Solidworks, but it only recognizes the model as an STL graphic and won't let me do CAD operations on it. Could I edit the CAD in Star or would I need another software such as Blender?

After I have a clean model it shouldn't be too difficult to repair the surface and set up the simulation.

An STL file is not CAD, therefore you won't be able to use any CAD package on it.

STAR-CCM+ has a surface repair utility which is great at dealing with only triangle data. Try working with that.

I figured it out... If you open the .dae file with Blender and then export it as an .STL, Star can open it just fine.