Tholian Web Spinner idea

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Winston

Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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The rocket in this thread:

Can you identify this mystery rocket?

https://www.rocketryforum.com/showt...this-mystery-rocket-What-do-you-know-about-it

kind of reminded me of the Tholian Web Spinner spacecraft. With clear plastic fins along the lower taper of the strakes, this might even have an inherently stable CG/CP relationship. Build with light ply around central tube, possibly with translucent sections and internal LED illumination for night flights. There are many different renditions of it, of course, since it's a fictional spacecraft:

tholian_web_spinner_by_admiral_horton-d7j9hiz.png


tholian-22nd-views.jpg


67928.jpg


26.jpg


Tholian_main.jpg


74c1afbbc4d2e9364f436dd6fbd562571342647804.jpg


[video=youtube;EMv_DtMVWbU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMv_DtMVWbU[/video]
 
That is the Tholian Widow Fighter. It was an upgrade design for TNG series, I believe. I had played round with a design to see if it was stable, and I believe it can be. This was a hasty OR design. The real thing would need to be made of balsa sheets and would be largely hollow. This design needs 4 oz. of nose weight, and when it is upscaled, the weight demands start to get pretty extreme.

Tholian Widow.jpg
 
That is the Tholian Widow Fighter. It was an upgrade design for TNG series, I believe. I had played round with a design to see if it was stable, and I believe it can be. This was a hasty OR design. The real thing would need to be made of balsa sheets and would be largely hollow. This design needs 4 oz. of nose weight, and when it is upscaled, the weight demands start to get pretty extreme.

View attachment 281797
Nice. Although it would detract visually, one might be able to get away with less nose weight of they made it with a greater L/D and used clear plastic fins from the apex of the strake to the base of the rocket.
 
Blue foam is the material used for the strakes and inter-strake fill. Fins extending below stakes are clear acrylic. Central tubing is BT-55, NC is Estes PNC-55 with 2oz nose weight. The projecting artifacts at the base of the nose cone are artifacts which would not be present in the finished product. This is at or close to a stability margin of 1 simmed in both Openrocket and Rocksim loaded with D12 BP and E20 composite motors, the only two I simmed, slightly better stability margin using Rocksim's method. 48" launch rod required to reach 40fps upon exit with D12. This is such an unusual design that I don't actually trust either sim program for stability or apogee projections.

Sim results:

Rocksim - 271 ft apogee - D12-3
Openrocket - 406 ft apogee - D12-5

Rocksim - 750 ft apogee - D20
Openrocket - 1879 ft apogee - D20

This was just an exercise to see if a design like this might be flyable. I have no plans to make one myself.

24808474162_b84029e63b_h.jpg


View attachment Tholian Web Spinner.ork
 
That is the Tholian Widow Fighter. It was an upgrade design for TNG series, I believe. I had played round with a design to see if it was stable, and I believe it can be. This was a hasty OR design. The real thing would need to be made of balsa sheets and would be largely hollow. This design needs 4 oz. of nose weight, and when it is upscaled, the weight demands start to get pretty extreme.

View attachment 281797

Very cool. Would you share that .ork? I'd love to see how you made this.
 
Just don't start mindsiming and adding egregious amounts of nose weight and power, that can lead to the Dark Side!
As Sheldon Cooper has said, "Wrong franchise." :) Anyway, if I don't have confidence that I can accurately sim it, I don't fly it. As a result, I don't build radically odd rockets. That OR sim was just to see, out of curiosity, if it even had a possibility of being made stable without insane amounts of nose weight.
 
This would be a good candidate for three canted motors with the Tholian Web spewing out the back like a wire guided TOW. How much line could you spool into the hind end? Maybe a little weight on the end holding the line on the ground so you could just reel it back in for recovery! You would face the WRATH OF KAHN at the RSO table! Only through a mind meld could you convince them it was safe to push the button. Those darn Tholians are so weird and radically odd! At least you would not have to pay franchise fees to Disney.:)
 
So this talk of wire out the back of rockets reminded me of something I had seen many years ago, where scientists were studying lightning strikes by launching rockets into thunderstorms that have a roll of copper wire letting out the back. The lighting would follow the wire vaporizing it in a green flash. They measured something at the point it hit, which they could choose with the wire and launch location.
https://m.ign.com/articles/2015/02/04/florida-lab-studies-lightning-by-firing-rockets-into-storms
 
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