Larry Curcio
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2009
- Messages
- 538
- Reaction score
- 3
Here is the flight from my Wildman Darkstar Extreme on an AT L900DM. I am surprised at the G forces at/around the apogee event and I think my main may have come out at apogee as a result, despite using nylon 2-56 shear pins. Since the flight was beyond visual range, the data is all I have to go on, but I do not see a drop in descent rate when the main charges go off. This rocket had redundant electronics, so an RRC3 was the primary for the apogee event and the Raven primary for the main event, and vice versa for backup duty. Also, the rocket went way off vertical shortly after leaving the rail, but I cannot determine the velocity at the time of the apogee event. Any thoughts on what the data says here?
FWIW:
These data are not obviously inconsistent, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're accurate. Assuming they are, analyzed them two ways:
1) OVAA, an off-vertical accelerometer analysis method. It assumes a ballistic trajectory. Taking you at your word that the off-vertical trajectory started early, the method backtracked a virtual launch angle and worked from there. The virtual angle was 77.8 degrees.
2) WGX, a method that uses a barometrically-adjusted speed estimate. It can compute a trajectory sine (WRT the horizontal) using that.
There was an extremely small discrepancy between WGX and OVAA sines, but that's to be expected as the OVAA sine is an approximation. Velocity curves virtually coincided. Note the residual velocity at apogee from the off-vertical trajectory.
BTW, used temperature-adjusted barometric data
Regards,