SpaceEggs
Rocket Propulsion Engineer
I'm not sure of the best place to ask this but it came up while I was working on the OpenRocket for my planned L3. I'm going to make it look like the BFR, delta winglets included, and currently I have them set in the sane configuration of 180° away from each other so they don't throw off the CP.
The real BFR's wings are supposed to be off to one side:
I don't plan to do it, but out of curiosity, how badly would it affect a rocket and how would one even go about simulating it? In low power rockets, it's easier to brute-force this kind of thing with more weights or huge fins but at large scale it gets more difficult. The one I'm simulating is 4.625" OD with the winglets being about 3" high. I tried to crudely sim such a configuration by splitting them and moving each one 30° off to one side, but OpenRocket doesn't seem to take lateral movement of the CP into account.
The obvious answer to me is that it would pitch toward the winglets and go out of control, but can the main fins be made sufficiently large so that it's stable nonetheless? Would the fins be just absurdly big at that point? I plan to have a couple camera nacelles (seen in the screenshot) but without sacrificing realism I can't make them so big that they offset the winglets. In any case, I'm sticking to symmetric winglets because I don't want to take any risks with an L3 (especially risks I can't simulate) but I will build a scale version to see what it does.
The real BFR's wings are supposed to be off to one side:
I don't plan to do it, but out of curiosity, how badly would it affect a rocket and how would one even go about simulating it? In low power rockets, it's easier to brute-force this kind of thing with more weights or huge fins but at large scale it gets more difficult. The one I'm simulating is 4.625" OD with the winglets being about 3" high. I tried to crudely sim such a configuration by splitting them and moving each one 30° off to one side, but OpenRocket doesn't seem to take lateral movement of the CP into account.
The obvious answer to me is that it would pitch toward the winglets and go out of control, but can the main fins be made sufficiently large so that it's stable nonetheless? Would the fins be just absurdly big at that point? I plan to have a couple camera nacelles (seen in the screenshot) but without sacrificing realism I can't make them so big that they offset the winglets. In any case, I'm sticking to symmetric winglets because I don't want to take any risks with an L3 (especially risks I can't simulate) but I will build a scale version to see what it does.