My LDRS34 experience

Well organized event - hats off to the leaders who made this happen.

My flying was so-so.

I lawn darted one rocket because I had simmed with a 24mm F51 Classic but in my morning stupid stupor bought and flew with the much less powerful F51 Blue Streak. Delay of 7s was absurdly long for that motor, the motor ejection happened on the ground, and my hot wire cable cutter rig didn't get a chance to show its stuff. On the repair bench, but poor showing on my part.

Kevlar burned through on my rear eject rocket, fixable, some crumpling of the upper 2" of the body tube.

Coupe of nominal mod rocket flights - there were a lot of cool low and mid power rockets flying from those pads.

One acceptable flight of The Tick, my 4" x 63" upscale of the Fliskits Flea on a CTI K1440. (Flew it once before on a J760). Flight to 5386', 24" drogue at apogee, 60" main at 800'. Some L3 practice on this rocket - two fully redundant ejection systems both powered by the new compact Stratologgers, all charges fired when expected. Data shows drogue only at apogee, approximate descent rate of 70 fps, slowing to 20 fps once the main deployed, so shear pin configuration is good through two flights now. It's a big finned and heavy rocket, and it did (as far as I could tell) coast and arc over for too long after the short 1.7s burn of the K1440 - recovered safely but on the far side of the drainage ditch so had to drive around.

Left on Saturday after only 2 days of flying - weather! All in all very glad I went, some very impressive flights and equally impressive cato's!



(My son with some of his CMASS/MMMSC buddies - he had a great time as did all the kids!).

Matt, it was great to see you there. Here is the mirror image of your pic.

Same here Mike & great pic!

Yes Matt, this LDRS was challenging to say the least. After 18 months of planning LDRS 34, the one thing you can't control is the weather. The last 2 weeks of June are usually dry in Potter and in the 80's rather than the 90's we had in July at LDRS 31, but the excessive rain over the last 2 weeks in the northeast made it the 4th and (possibly the 3rd) wettest June on record in the Finger Lakes region of NY.

We had heavy rain on Tuesday, the day before setup, but fortunate the field dried up and we finished about 6 PM. Thursday was fine and a great day for BFRs after the early morning low cloud ceiling lifted. It rained a little over night and the URRG high power launch system had a dampness issue that requied a couple hours to resolvebut after we dried out the wires to the pad we had an exceptional day. We knew that weather on Saturday would not be good so with great cooperation from the FAA, we had the 12,000 no-call-in waiver extended till 9 PM, and we ran out of high power rockets to launch before the waiver expired, 12 hours after we started launching at 9 AM. Then we had a Class 1 night launch which finished at 11 PM ending the 14 hour launch day with a launch count somewhere over 550 rockets IIRC. The committee was down at the field on Saturday but the road and field were saturated so the only function on Saturday was the banquet which was fantastic.

Sunday morning was wet and the field was not usable, however several folks showed up in mid afternoon between storms and we actually launched a couple dozen Class 1 rocket and a few low altitude Class 2 rockets before the next front came thru in the late afternoon. It rained lightly overnight and when we arrived at the field on Monday we could drive to the oasis but not on the field. We walked out and got the equipment up and after a shower at 10:30 the sky brightened, the ceiling lifted and the sun came out so we launched from 11:30 to 3:30 before we shut down.

Despite the horrible weather with rain on 4 of the 5 scheduled launch days, we actually launched on 4 of the 5 days which amounted to 26 hours of the scheduled 39 launch hours not counting the 2 hour Class 1 night launch. At LDRS 34 I estimate we launched about 800-900 rockets during the 4 days we got to launch rocket (excluding the night launch) which was about 200 less than the LDRS 31 launch in 5 days.

The organizing committee was disappointed with the weather but we did the best we could during what will go down as the wettest non-hurricane week on record in June in the Finger Lakes.

Bob

It was a great time anyway Bob,,,
My greatest compliments to the hosting club...
Everybody ran and worked their tails off...
Talk about getting lemons and making lemonade,,,,
You guys are all the best......

Teddy

That was a great summary Bob.
The folks from URRG and CATO worked hard to pull this off, but as you point out some things are out of our hands, with Mother Nature being the most important of those non controllable variables!

Excellent summary indeed Bob. I had a great time, weather or not, and look forward to the next driving distance LDRS.

It was a great launch and a big "Thank You!" to the organizers. Lets hope the Potter site stays active for years to come.

Threemorewishes said:

It was a great launch and a big "Thank You!" to the organizers. Lets hope the Potter site stays active for years to come.

Click to expand...

+1....

Teddy