Folks,
A bit of a necro-thread-post here, but I finally got Red Prince into the air.
Yesterday I took off from work. It was supposed to be ~60 F and <7 miles wind in the morning. Went out to my local park, and was pleased to find it mostly empty. I set up at the top of the hill but unfortunately the wind up there was much more than expected. I decided to launch from the bottom of the hill, using it to block the wind.
Launch 1 was on a C6-3. It was a bit under powered, and had already arced over and was on its way down when the ejection happened. Chute got stuck inside, and it just tumbled to the ground, which was wet and soggy. No damage. Here are some pics going up:
After cleaning some mud off the nosecone tip, I loaded her up with an Aerotech D10-3.
The engines are a couple years old; had a failure with an Estes Sonic. Tried with a First Fire Junior (I think it was) and got one chuff then a beautiful sound of ripping air. I was prepared for the loud D10 explosion sound, but with the hill reflecting sound at me, it was seriously startling. My camera takes images every 100 msec, and I only got one on the way up, due to teleportation effect:
It went "way up there" and drifted a bit due to wind. I recovered it at the edge of my field, about 600 feet away. I got shots of it descending, showing proper deployment of parachute and that the body and nose section were hanging as planned, not bumping into each other.
I only launched a few yesterday, as I had other stuff to do, but it was good to get out there and have success!