Green Jello said:
It was for the Odd Roc competition. Was the Tiki Bar or Jim's flying console TV any different?
The Tiki Bar was quite different. It was designed and built from the ground up with the intent of flying under rocket motor power and being safely recovered on a designed and working recovery system. It worked well enough to take first prize.
A snow mobile with a running, working engine and drive-train, purpose built for mobility "ON LAND" does not make it an Odd Rocket when you strap a rocket motor and parachute to it. It is a snow mobile with a rocket motor strapped to it and a cobbled up recovery system.
Nothing more. It's giving the bird to the safety code and the reasons we ALL fly ROCKETS.
But two(?) years later and it's still talked about. So in an advertising (sort of) way, it did work.
Exactly, it's obvious this is why it was done, solely for the publicity and advertising value for the people involved with flying it.
I bet I could find an old boat around here to fly on some rocket motors. Heck, wouldn't that be a great idea to fly a boat at the next LDRS!?!? I mean hey, they're made out of mostly fiberglass, right? There shouldn't be anything wrong with that. It'll fit right in.
Strapping big rocket motors onto cars and lighting them (boats in my case) is the thing all of us as kids daydreamed about. (still do sometimes) Sure we'd love to do it, sure we love watching someone do it on TV, but we'd never dream of asking to fly a land driven, working vehicle and a sanctioned rocket launch, because we all (most of us) know it's not
at all what our hobby (or OddRocks) is about. That's what makes the snow mobile different.