D-Rocket Glider for NARAM

The Rocketry Forum

Help Support The Rocketry Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

WFWalby

Well-Known Member
TRF Supporter
Joined
Sep 22, 2014
Messages
245
Reaction score
77
Location
Sacramento, CA
Would love to try my hand at D-Rocket Glider and was wondering what kits/plans were available for this event? I know it's a non-RC event but are some of you competitors using modified RC models? Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
William
 
Is this something that would easily scale? There are lots of plans for lower powered gliders.
 
William,

Best of luck, and good for you for trying something new! I participated in my first ever NARAM last year, and it was a hoot! Good thing I wasn't trying to be competitive - I think my best finish in any event was 8th, with several events that ended without a qualified flight. So, with that caveat in front:

https://www.nar.org/contest-flying/competition-guide/duration-events/rocketglider-duration/ is where I started. It lists a bunch of plans, and I went with the Mediocre Fred. Model is build, going to try to fly it this weekend. Interested to see how it goes.

The one piece of advice I got from Tim at Apogee on this event is "Fly the field!". Backstory: I built one of Apogee's Stratus Gale rocket glider kits (https://www.apogeerockets.com/Rocket_Kits/Skill_Level_5_Kits/Stratus_Gale) for the C rocket-glider event at NARAM last year. (That was my 8th place finish). I was asking Tim about flying it on a D10 (18mm AP motor) for this year's NARAM. That is where the piece of advice came in. He has flown the Stratus Gale on a D, and it boosted out of sight. That's going to be even more of an issue this summer where the humidity -> hazy -> harder to visually track rockets. His advice involved flying a bigger rocket that would be easier to keep an eye on.

Good luck, and hope to see you this summer. Maybe I'll even place 7th

BTW, I would suggest getting and building a Stratus Gale before trying anything else. I thought the video directions were great, and it walked me through a very complicated first glider build. The two things that were trickiest for me were 1) Airfoiling the wing and 2) the dihedral in the wing. It was a lot easier to go through that learning process with a kit and instructions, and then later apply that experience to a plan build. Just my $0.02.
 
Last edited:
Last edited:
Back
Top