All in all, Saturday was a pretty nice rocket-flying day
for November. It was chilly in the morning, but we
eventually saw some sunshine later. The afternoon seemed milder
and more comfortable. Winds were light, out of the east to
southeast, and ranged from nearly calm to maybe 5mph.
Still, turnout for this bonus launch was small. As a bonus for
this bonus launch, all the corn was gone!!!
I flew my tube-fin rocket, "Starstruck VI" on an
H128W-M. It was a very nice flight. It landed towards the north
end of the north field.
My "big" flight for the day was "It's the Great Pumpkin
Rocket, Charlie Brown". This creation started life as a light-up
lawn decoration that I purchased at Menards. It's made of
blow-molded orange plastic and looks
like a stack of jack-o-lanterns. The plastic pumpkins act as an
aerodynamic shroud and one of them as the nose cone. Inside is
the true rocket - built around 3" LOC tubing with a 38mm motor
mount. The fins are big pieces of clear 3/16" plexiglass (cut
from pieces that I bought years ago at Ax-Man). It needed more
than a pound of nose weight to put the CG well in front of my
guesstimated CP location. The entire rocket (without motor)
ended up weighing over 7 pounds! Recovery was with a Rocketman
R7 chute. I flew it on the biggest motor that I had left -
an I211W. Based on rough simulations, I drilled the delay down
to about 4 seconds.
Liftoff was great! (The sim had said 6-7 g's.) The
flight was straight and true. Ejection was early. I should have
tried more for a 5 or 6 second delay. Recovery was fine, and it
landed on the soft dirt of the next field. For something so
silly, and bulbous, and non-aerodynamic, it flew very nicely.
Assuming that I'll be able to get a motor, I'll have to fly it
again some day. (An I285 Redline would be cool!)
My third and final flight for the day was my LOC Hi-Tech
on an H148R-M. This was a very nice, very high flight.
Some pictures:
http://reality.sgiweb.org/overby/
under Model Rockets, the 'November 2006' link has pictures from
Saturday's launch. I also put the September 2005 link back (it
got lost).
My first flight was of a semi-scale model of the Sandia
Tomahawk on an old G motor I bought earlier this year. The
ejection charge didn't fire (but the delay grain burned) and the
rocket made this loud "WOOSH" sound just before the Pop+Crack of
impact on the dirt road. The altimeter (flown as a payload only)
was destroyed. I never found half of it's parts.
My last flight of the day was pretty nice. It was a
scratchbuilt rocket on a D9-4. I have been avoiding flying those
motors after some bad experiences with rockets that were too
heavy for the motor, but with the right (small) rocket they
aren't that bad.
The totals were: 44 flights, 50 motors. The cumulative
total impulse was 2884 Ns with an average total impulse of 57.7 Ns.
The motor breakdown follows:
