Congratulations on your successful flight! I'm paying close attention to your fin configuration.
Question: Were you able to see what was going on at apogee and at the ejection charge event?
Thanks! It was very satisfying.
weird day videoing. Everything was a sun seeker, no matter where I aimed the rod everything flew right into the sun. Also tried videoing in landscape mode with my phone camera, most of the flight I missed on video.
not sure if I was just before, at, or after apogee, but seemed like as soon as the ejection charge fired, the rocket jerked, started falling, and almost immediately went horizontal. Your rocket kind of made a very broad spiral descent, mine was a bit tighter in the spiral. It really didn’t have much “on axis” forward motion, certainly nothing I would call a glide. I think the spiral itself might be because of ASYMMETRIC Magnus Effect, but I’m not sure. It would make sense that the Magnus Effect would be stronger at the fin end of the rocket due to a greater curvature. Certainly didn’t have anything like
@Rktman described, a rocket hanging horizontal and heading longitudinally for the horizon. However,
@Dotini and I may be victims of our own success, I don’t think Eric’s rocket was MEANT to spin, while spinning is just about the WHOLE point of our rockets, aside from their long length. I should finish SQUIRT! pretty soon, it is a relatively short rocket set up for horizontal spin.
I think stealing
@Mugs914 idea for the tube fin can with the cutout has really provided a near optimal “spin catcher”.
offhand, aside from saucers and monocopters , which are inherently low performance birds (cool, but somewhere I read a review where the RSO watching a saucer go up on a high power motor described it as “a beautiful waste of propellant.” I think that was in RocketReviews, maybe
@jadebox remembers it.). Anyhoo, aside from saucers I can’t think of any other rocket that recovers safely WITHOUT some major change in geometry, from the classic deploying chutes air streamer or helicopter blade or AirBrakes, through gliders and tumblers that have either a CG shift or a CP shift or both, through featherweights which eject the motors. We may really have a decent flier (not gonna get any altitude records, but the alternatives, saucers and monocopters set the bar pretty low) that really is about a simple as a model rocket can get, IF we can make it in breakable.