Drag Queen, a slightly off-kilter spool

The Rocketry Forum

Help Support The Rocketry Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

boatgeek

Well-Known Member
Joined
Dec 27, 2014
Messages
7,292
Reaction score
7,700
One more entry from Boatgeek's House of Ridiculous Rockets. I wanted to build an LPR spool, and heck, what says fun like clusters, right? So out of foamboard and 18mm body tube came this guy:

IMG_1302.JPG

Unfortunately, when I glued it up two years ago, it was a little off-kilter. The plates of the spool aren't exactly perpendicular to the body tubes. It still flies pretty well on a A-C motors in the central core, with a little bit of a cyclical wobble in flight. It's one of the few rockets that can get a sub-50 foot flight out of a C motor.

I've flown the rocket a few times under the name Catawampus. I put a nose cone and parachute on it, though that ended up being a bit superfluous because even the shortest delays pop after it hits the ground. So I took off the nose cone, added a few bamboo skewers to reinforce the body tube where it had gotten crumpled a bit, and painted the rocket. One of my students declared that the ideal name for the rocket is Drag Queen, so she's now painted in red glitter.

IMG_2076.JPG

Next weekend, she flies on two clusters of Q-jets for ease of ignition. We'll start with a B-D-B all in a line. If that goes well, we'll go to a D-C-C-B-B-A-A 7-motor cluster, with the D in the middle and matched pairs of motors opposite each other. I expect it'll get to about 200 feet in a cloud of smoky glory.
 
I'd post something in this thread, but it would probably get me in trouble.

ssixsixsix
 
One more entry from Boatgeek's House of Ridiculous Rockets....<snipped>... One of my students declared that the ideal name for the rocket is Drag Queen, so she's now painted in red glitter....<snipped>...
Hmm, I think you meant to write:

"One of my students declared that the ideal name for the rocket is Drag Queen, so he's now painted in red glitter."

I hope you don't teach grade school!


Tony
 
Hmm, I think you meant to write:

"One of my students declared that the ideal name for the rocket is Drag Queen, so he's now painted in red glitter."

I hope you don't teach grade school!


Tony

I debated that, will have to think further and consult with members of the local LGBT community. I don't actually teach, I just mentor a high school TARC team. That said, the drag queen story times are extremely popular in the Seattle Public Libraries. They're just like every other story time on the planet, with the presenter reading children's books to 1-3 year olds and their parents, except that the presenter is a drag queen in full regalia.
 
My local LGBT community member says that using she/her pronouns is correct for a drag queen in costume. Since the rocket is painted, she is always in costume!
 
If the bottom plate was interchangeable, it would be interesting to measure altitude as a function of diameter! Maybe using velcro to stick different sized flat donuts on the current plate would do it.
 
If the bottom plate was interchangeable, it would be interesting to measure altitude as a function of diameter! Maybe using velcro to stick different sized flat donuts on the current plate would do it.

That is an interesting idea. I'm not sure I could do it with this rocket, but you could certainly make a center core that accepted different sized disks. Plumbing parts or 3-D printed pieces would probably make this easier.
 
Back
Top