Someone said words to this effect MANY years ago, to the general question whether the hobby is expensive:
It's only as expensive as you want it to be
The core of that holds true. Of course it'd be nice to have an unlimited budget.
So, when I see some complaining about the cost, then see what KIND of rockets some are doing that cost so much…. it's not that "the hobby" as become too expensive it's that they are doing the hobby at a level of expense that they can't justify anymore, or were over-reaching to begin with (I'm oversimplifying a bit, such as other "life" issues like reduction of income, sudden expenses such as needing to replace a car, etc).
i've had some times when I had to cut back. In some of those times I still went to club launches, but mostly to be involved with the launch, flying little. And cutting back on building more expensive stuff.
My secondary hobby is R/C planes (and some multicopter flying in the last year). The expense of those is sort of relative and sort of based on luck or other random events. Once having bought say a Radian Electric plane and having four battery packs (and a charger that can charge 4 packs), I can fly for two hours, and in theory fly all day long (always charging 2-3 packs), for a few cents worth of the electricity to charge the battery packs, and a few cents of depreciation on the battery packs for eventual replacement. BUT, stuff happens, R/C models can crash (The last two major crashes I had, one was a bad receiver brand that turned out have terrible range, the other was a stupid thing I did at low altitude too far away). So then there is the cost of repair, or replacement if it's a total loss or if the model flies away. But for awhile, I had a string of several years where I flew the same electric sailplane on hundreds of flights without incident, the only cost was the electricity to charge the batteries, and the packs going bad due to so many charge cycles, so I had to replace them. Indeed, ironically, that electric sailplane that I flew for so many years, was the one that had a bad crash due to changing from 72 mHz to a 2.4Gig receiver that turned out to be a bad receiver with terrible range.
More often, the cost of something new, whether a new model (like getting into Multicopters) or a piece of equipment (upgrading to a charger that can charge 4 packs). The Quadcopter I have is one I built mostly from scratch (using a $10 frame), which saved some $ and let me build what I wanted (it's a 250 sized model that I added GPS to). I have not had a major crash with it, so far the extra expenses with it have been minor to replace broken props from "landing incidents". The technology allowing these models to work and fly like this, software tweakable by the flier (ArduPilot type), is still incredible. And….the flight controllers used for those can be used to make model rockets fly vertically…. such controllers themselves cost as little as $25 now.
- George Gassaway
[video=youtube;vS2dcA2Wp84]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS2dcA2Wp84[/video]
