What is your best method of Level 3 recovery? At Maryland' Higgs Farm usually has soft grounds, lots of cord length for occasional tree retrieval. I always configure the drogue in the booster section and main in a good-sized length of payload bay.
1) Do you prefer d-bag and separate recovery of the nose?
2) My last issue was my 6" IRIS has such large fin area, it tends float up towards the drogue and gets tangled in the cord just before main deployment. Should I use a larger drogue to keep it down below?
Let me know your best recovery configuration of chutes and cords for larger rockets.
I had the same problem you are describing when I was testing my stabilization system. The problem was that with the stabilization section weight, the upper airframe was heavier than normal. So, with a smaller drogue, the fin can would fly high and with a larger drogue, both sections would hang down. In either case, the main tended to get tangled trying to get past the various air frame sections. After some thought, research and experimentation, I came up with a way to manage this problem as best as possible. My last three L3 certifications have used the method with success.
What I think I learned is that the most reliable way to deploy a typical L3 rocket is to recover the cone on its own chute. The remainder of the recovery system, in order, is a harness, the main chute, the d-bag and the d-bag pilot. The idea is for the d-bag/pilot to rise up above the remaining parts and then deploy once the harness become tout. The smaller d-bag/pilot can get past the other equipment more easily compared to a large main chute.
I prefer to keep the cone with the remainder of the rocket rather than recover it separate (all my tracking equipment is typically in the cone). Since the cone is another common source of fouling, I put the cone on its own long harness. So, starting from the air frame, there is one long harness for the cone and a separate harness to the main, d-bag, pilot as above. When the main section deploys, the cone gets out of the way quickly.
A disadvantage of the above approach is that the weight of the cone is no longer available to help pull out the main. For larger rockets, it is often the cone pulling out the main rather than the charge pushing it out. Therefore, it is my opinion that the method is best applied with a piston. The piston pushes everything out and the two harnesses are attached to the piston. However, two of my L3's were confident that the charge would get the main out, so they used the method without the piston.
I posted two sets of pictures in this thread (Posts 6 and 7) that show a nose cone view of how the method works. Wizard's post (Post 43) showed how the method worked in his L3 flight.
https://www.rocketryforum.com/showthread.php?126952-deployment-Bag-Help
Jim
