This is incredibly cool stuff. I've been reading through the whole website (particularly the testing logs) and it's fascinating.
Although I'm not a candidate to actually purchase and try out this stuff, I sure am glad there are folks pushing the envelope like this.
I sent the guy a list of questions about functionality and limitations, and haven't heard back after three days. I was ready to send him the deposit, but now I'm off the bandwagon.
If the supplier/vendor doesn't respond back to your questions before he takes the money, he is even less likely to do so afterwards when you need his support.
I liked his idea of the brake petals during decent,then blow a chute.
I'm not convinced this will do much good.
If you don't pop a guide/drogue chute at apogee, the rocket will self-aim into the wind and then descent at and angle dictated by the drag of the airframe. All my larger rockets descent semi-horizontally on under-sized drogue chutes, so the petals will get minimal airflow, unless they are exotically ginormous. At that point it becomes a huge complications for minimal, if any, gain.
I think its just too hard to reliably ignite a solid fuel.motor for a standing landing to be practical, let alone not start a fire.
An even bigger trouble is throttling the output with solid fuel motors, which is nearly impossible, but a prerequisite for controlled descent.
The guidance is neat but limited to long burn motors to be interesting, f10, e6, g12 etc, as there isn't much coast, they seem to pitch or tumble pretty quickly, so not sure that they are super stable without the vectoring. At least what I can tell from the videos.
That's the kicker.
As outlined, this product only works during the burn phase of the motor, so you need to fly on slow-burn motors (limiting your choices, but OK for now). On the other hand, if you flew on a motor that got the rocket to 60+ fps off the launch rod, the aerodynamics and fins take over, and you don't need much stabilization (beyond wind cocking) anyway. In a way, you create a problem by flying slow off the rod with long-burn motors, and solve the problem you just created with thrust vectoring.
Still cool.
But now you add weight of the gizmo, and more weight from the width of the rocket required to fit the gizmo, and I'm suddenly out of airframes where it could fit.
OK, so I can buy and build something dedicated just for this experiment.
Then you add the fact that it's not easily transferable between rockets, and this becomes an expensive one-off experiment that can fly on very few motors, that can still be written-off if the chute pops off to soon, or not at all (lawn-dart).
...or, I can fly on a regular fast burning motor that gets me off the rod fast enough to stabilize via aerodynamics on
all of my rockets... all the time...
Hmmm,
a