Okay so I have a really interesting problem that I am dealing with in one of my classes at school. We are designing a rocket but because of a series of misunderstandings I'm trying to get a minimum diameter rocket with a Contrail M1491 motor to exactly 10,000ft. Obviously that sounds like extreme overkill because it is but I still have to solve the problem. In OpenRocket it sims to roughly 25,000ft when reasonably optimized. If I set the surface quality to the roughest setting it takes a huge penalty to altitude which is progress. That in addition to a pair of camera pods should get me to my target so I think I may be going the right direction with this.
So my question is this: Have any of you used surface roughness to control altitude before? If so how did it go? Also, what analytical method did you use to determine your surface imperfection size?
I was thinking of coating the rocket in some specific size of sand or some other particle if I could figure out what it needed. Generally speaking skin temperature shouldn't be too much of an issue because its mostly aluminum. Also NAR and TRA rules do not apply.
So my question is this: Have any of you used surface roughness to control altitude before? If so how did it go? Also, what analytical method did you use to determine your surface imperfection size?
I was thinking of coating the rocket in some specific size of sand or some other particle if I could figure out what it needed. Generally speaking skin temperature shouldn't be too much of an issue because its mostly aluminum. Also NAR and TRA rules do not apply.