Asymmetrical, BFR-like fins - What would happen?

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SpaceEggs

Rocket Propulsion Engineer
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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.

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The real BFR's wings are supposed to be off to one side:

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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.
 
We had a guy that liked to build models with asymmetrical fins, one in particular he called "Bad Bertha" which was a conventional Big Bertha, except only two fins were placed in their usual position, 90 degrees apart, then the third fin was placed "somewhere" between them on the far side, nearer to one than the other. The fourth fin was placed up the body maybe 8-10" forward. The path this rocket would take would be a wide, but fairly predictable spiral.

His defense of these rockets with their odd paths, was that he just didn't like straight up and down flights.

so, your rocket is simpler than that, with just two fins off to one side? but way forward on the body? It is definitely not something I would want to do for a L3 cert (where you should do the L3 equivalent of whatever "The Very Model of A Modern Major Rocket Cert" was).

If you're really serious about it, though, make smaller models powered in the B and C range and try it. If you can make it work by tweaking it, you might get some clues as to how to sim it.
 
Definitely not going to do it on the cert, I'm very hesitant to stray from a normal, robust rocket. My L2 was extremely overbuilt since I had experienced a couple failures before. This L3 is more or less just an upscale of that, except that I added the winglets for looks. I've done canards before so as long as they're symmetrical I'm not worried about them.

If they were very small I might do them off-axis like the real thing, but then there wouldn't be a point in having them. On Monday I will build a little version, for testing purposes. One hard part to doing it is securely attaching the winglets to the body tube. Either I shave them down to fit onto the tube, or I cut out an appropriately shaped slot in the tube and put them on as a single piece. Again, not the kind of thing I want to introduce to an L3 cert attempt.
 

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