FLISKITS 8th Anniversary Launch with CMASS on September 18

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Wet pants, and the barefoot bandit... that's me.

It wasn't the wind as much as the main chute and the upper section coming out about 500ft too early (drag or shake-loose separation).

Name tags are not a bad idea. I seem to remember that in the not so distant past.

See ya, and the wife next time.

.
 
Here's a couple of my videos from the launch.
This one features the voice of CMASS Kenn Blade. :)
[YOUTUBE]HRlqBj-IBt8[/YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]g6nF36Xhbw4[/YOUTUBE]

And some screen caps.

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The weather was great. Unfortunately, I didn't have a great landing of my Black Brant II. My three other flights were perfect. The I-ROC was once again a favorite of the children walking by. Now that the test flight has been done, it is now time to get working on getting it back to dual deployment once again.

Jim, the Shadowlord is a great kit. You weren't kidding when you said it would be a mover. I look forward to flying it again in October.
 
Thanks to Jim Flis of FlisKits for a fun day for everyone and for sponsoring the flight of the 9ft upscale Tres. Thanks to Carl Tulanko for building this beautifully crafted rocket and giving Jim and I permission to fly it. Thanks also to Doug Gardei for helping with motor retention and the loan of a case, Robert DeHate of AMW for the loan of another case and selling the motors, and to the many other helpful folks at CMASS.

Pictures: Tres on display at FlisKits, on the way to RSO, prepping at the pad with lots of help.

It took some creativity to temporarily convert a two-stage rocket with single-deploy first-stage recovery to a single-stage rocket with dual-deploy recovery.

The upper section of the rocket (designed to be the second stage) fired the 3ft drogue at apogee out of its motor tube. Wires to switch on the altimeter can be seen taped to the outside of the rocket in the second picture.

A second altimeter was inside a white 29mm pod I built for this flight, which can be seen in pictures 2 and 3. This connected to an ejection charge
inside the lower section of the rocket (designed to be the first stage). A 7ft main brought the rocket down gently.

A tiny BoosterVision DVR was taped to near the top of the rocket. Both the white altimeter pod and DVR were removed cleanly after the flight.

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Used two igniters in each of the 3x AMW/CTI 38mm 3grain I-212 Smokey Sam motors, one Rocketflite ML and one ematch that came with each motor.

The huge Tres kicked off the pad quickly and cleanly rising on a column of dense black smoke. The visual effect of the three smoke trails was very cool.

Liftoff weight was close to 18 lbs and went up on a J cluster with about 1100 Ns of impulse and 600 N of thrust. The 2 Perfectflite HA45K altimeters reported 1440 and 1452 feet.

Flight video here includes both onboard and from the ground:

Standard Def (9MB) https://www.bpasa.com/Movies2010/Tres4a.wmv

High Def (26MB) https://www.bpasa.com/Movies2010/Tres4a.mpg

Jim Flis can be heard expressing his delight with the flight in the video.

It took me a week to get this posted because my computer kept crashing while trying to edit content from two new video cameras. After flashing the PC's BIOS, updating video, sound, chipset and network drivers, and removing a sound card and second monitor, I was able to run the combination of editing programs that got the results I was looking for.

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Both drogue and main deployed fully and on-time. The main was set to deploy at 700 ft which worked out well. The Tres came down gently in an open field of soft grass well away from spectators.

The nose cone did not play a role in this recovery, so I tethered it and left it loose fitting so it would separate during recovery and not be driven into the ground by the weight of the rocket body. There was some tangling between the long drogue and main harnesses, but the chutes were unaffected by this.

While all aspects of doing this flight were a lot of fun, I particularly enjoyed the clean recovery as I was flying a finely-crafted rocket that belonged to someone else.

Jim and I were feeling pretty good after the flight.

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Great video Boris.
Your launches are always the high light of any CMASS launch.

If Jim's voice was a little higher he would have sounded like a giddy school girl. :D
 
Jim,

Congratulations on your anniversary of Flistkits and you know I wish you and Kathy all the best you deserve. It looks like you had a great crowd and that's what makes it an even better event. You have come a long way bro!

Boris, thank you for taking good care of one of my kids, the Tres, and great job on the launch. I loved the video, which was very well done and I now want to get my hands on some full res pics...we will have to talk to Jim about that. Also, great job on the conversion...had I known you were going to put an Altimeter in the lower section, that much I could have sent, as I have a bolt in bay for it built and hanging on my workbench. You managed to work around that though and did a great job prepping and flying her and I was glad to see it got in the air again. She came off the pad like normal, nice and brisk but not too fast, just as I remembered. I don't think Jim stopped giggling until it was back at the tent!!!;) Thanks again for all your efforts!

Also, thanks to all of those that pitched in and helped make Jim and Kathy's day a memorable one.

Best wishes,

Carl
 
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Jim,

Congratulations on your anniversary of Flistkits and you know I wish you and Kathy all the best you deserve. It looks like you had a great crowd and that's what makes it an even better event. You have come a long way bro!

Boris, thank you for taking good care of one of my kids, the Tres, and great job on the launch. I loved the video, which was very well done and I now want to get my hands on some full res pics...we will have to talk to Jim about that. Also, great job on the conversion...had I known you were going to put an Altimeter in the lower section, that much I could have sent, as I have a bolt in bay for it built and hanging on my workbench. You managed to work around that though and did a great job prepping and flying her and I was glad to see it got in the air again. She came off the pad like normal, nice and brisk but not too fast, just as I remembered. I don't think Jim stopped giggling until it was back at the tent!!!;) Thanks again for all your efforts!

Also, thanks to all of those that pitched in and helped make Jim and Kathy's day a memorable one.

Best wishes,

Carl

I was thinkin' 'bout ya, bro. All month long :) It was great to see her in the air again and the folks at CMASS really enjoyed it. Her older sister, the 38mm Deuce, is on display at a local hobby shop so neither is sitting in a dark corner collecting dust :)
 
It took me a week to get this posted because my computer kept crashing while trying to edit content from two new video cameras. After flashing the PC's BIOS, updating video, sound, chipset and network drivers, and removing a sound card and second monitor, I was able to run the combination of editing programs that got the results I was looking for.

Then you definitely don't want to hear that these videos will not play on my mac with the both the Perian and Flip4Mac codec packages installed which cover all but the most bizarre video formats. ;-) Fortunately I *can* play them with VLC, which is a good thing, because both the videos and the flight kick serious ass! And that laugh... Yeah, I know that laugh. ;-)
 
I'm not really sure where to ask this, so I figured I'd just ask here....

One of the things I noticed about this flight, in both the ground and on-board cameras, was the very distinct exhaust plumes. I can't ever recall seeing such pronounced plumes in a cluster launch before. The reason became very clear when I saw the photo of you guys prepping the model on the pad.

I am aware of the practice in clusters of canting motors towards the center to keep the model going straight if one or more motors fail to ignite. What I am not sure of is how to calculate that angle. I am guessing that it is not calculated, per se, but rather one experiments with various angles in a simulator until a straight flight is achieved with a single motor. Is there a tutorial somewhere that shows how to do this?

Nonetheless, my gut tells me that these motors might be canted to an even greater degree, perhaps specifically to achieve the great visual effect. any comments on this as well?
 
This is an upscale of an existing kit, the FlisKits Tres, which has these canted motors specifically to create this very cool triple motor plume.

Jim Flis showed a beautiful 24mm Tres (currently available kit is 18mm) at the last CMASS launch and I requested to order one as soon as they become available.

If designing a cluster rocket from scratch, canting the motors towards the center of mass is a very sound design concept. If one or more motors is not ignited at launch, then the others will still be pushing the center of mass of the rocket in an upwards trajectory.

I saw an upscale Deuce (another cool FilsKits kit) fire only one of its two motors at LDRS28 and still achieve a safe and very cool flight because of its canted motors and big fins.

Jim flew the 24mm Tres prototype and one of the three motor tubes stripped off the rocket and it still had a great flight!

The Tres also benefits from having length and a lot of distributed fin surface, so it wants to be a very stable rocket.

For this flight I used dual igniters in each motor, one CTI and one Rocketflite, mostly to assure getting the full impulse of the three motors. If only two canted I-212 motors had fired, the 18 lb rocket would have accelerated at about 5Gs and struggled with slow speed and low deployment.
 
According to Apogee the optimum angle for canted motors is one that passes thru a point midway between the center of pressure and the center of gravity. This can be tricky to do on a high power design where the motors and components can vary. The choice of engines is another variable, lower thrust motors give a smoother performance if all light but a marginal performance if some do not light. Higher thrust motors give better thrust to weight ratios with partial ignition but subject the rocket to much higher forces if ignition is not perfectly timed. Some way to be able to adjust the engine cant angle on the fly would be ideal but I am not sure how it could be designed.
 
Thanks Terry, that was exactly the bit of information I was looking for. If this came from Apogee, that almost certainly means that there is a tech bulletin on the topic which will have some more great tips, including how to design in RockSim.

I can imagine several different ways to obtain the ability to change the cant angle. The most straightforward would be a removable cluster motor mount, where the cant angle in each individual mount would be fixed.

Infinitely variable cant angles are a bit more tricky, but I already have an idea as to how I might do it. I make all of my own motors and casings, so it would be easy enough to fashion a forward bulkhead with a through-pin fitting. This would be both the pivot point as well as the thrust "ring". No clear ideas as yet how to best lock down the nozzle end to the desired angle, but I am sure I will come up with something.
 
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