Well, the launch on Saturday was a disaster. I brought four rockets in addition to the Ellipse. Before we even introduced ourselves, as I put down my folding chair, the shoulder strap caught two of them and folded them over the rim of the milk crate I had them in. Both are probably repairable.
After the Ellipse flight I tried to launch both my Big Daddy and my Grand Daddy, a modified Big Daddy on which I did my L1 flight. Well, I had no engines for the Grand Daddy with sufficient delays. I prepped the Big Daddy with an E9, and it blew out the nozzle, never lifting an inch. I tried again, with the same result. I had another E9 that I am dead certain was from a different manufacturing lot, but the third time was not the charm as it too blew the nozzle out. That's when I gave up and went home.
So what about the main event, The Ellipse? Here it is on the launch stand, prepped with a D12.
That's The Ellipse on the right, and Gary's Magic Dart on the left. Gary's flight was gorgeous. The Ellipse's assent was perfect. Straight and pretty quick despite the heavy nose weight. It reached nice altitude, arced over, and then the deployment... failed to happen. It came down as straight as it went up, and seemed like it was nearly as fast. From now on, when you look up "smithereens" in the dictionary, you'll see this:
My friend Scott got video of the takeoff, but very quickly lost sight of the rocket, so we've only got four seconds of video worth posting.
[video]https://youtu.be/3rUfVjLlbhM[/video]
I did figure out the cause. Because of the weight, I had to use a decent sized parachute, a 15 incher. The chute jammed in the stuffer tube that I had added to ensure that the chute wouldn't snag. All I could salvage was the fins and the lumps of lead and epoxy.
If I rebuild using skin over frame again, I will make a modification to the recovery system as follows: I will leave out the stuffer tube and use the fully open ribs all the way up. Before placing the skin over (outside) the ribs, I will place a skin inside the large open ribs to form the parachute compartment. This one doesn't have to be pretty, it only has to keep the chute from snagging. And it will give me a lot more space than a BT-50 to pack the chute.
So, I forget whether or not, by the posted contest rules, this is a DQ. If I'm still in then the take-off video is my official entry.