adrian
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- Jan 19, 2009
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At a recent rocketry event, I'd been building a couple of more sensible models. Then, after a couple of beers, I noticed that there was quite a bit of junk lying around on my table, including the remnant of a nose cone which had been cut down for another project, and several balsa off-cuts left over after cutting out some fins for something else. So I put them together:
Not being entirely drunk, I put the result through a swing test. Two of them, in fact - when a rocket has mismatched fins like this, it needs to be tested, rotated 90 degrees and tested again to prove that it is stable in both pitch and yaw planes. Since I hardly believed it had passed and didn't expect the RSO to believe it either, I got a witness. The following day it was allowed onto a pad, the flight card literally giving its name as Random Junk I Found On My Bench:
It went up nice and straight:
And probably came down somewhere. There is no solid evidence of this, though.
Not being entirely drunk, I put the result through a swing test. Two of them, in fact - when a rocket has mismatched fins like this, it needs to be tested, rotated 90 degrees and tested again to prove that it is stable in both pitch and yaw planes. Since I hardly believed it had passed and didn't expect the RSO to believe it either, I got a witness. The following day it was allowed onto a pad, the flight card literally giving its name as Random Junk I Found On My Bench:
It went up nice and straight:
And probably came down somewhere. There is no solid evidence of this, though.
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