OpenRocket, my Estes Mongoose and others

I've been playing around with OpenRocket for a couple of days and I'm finding it really enjoyable. It's a great piece of software

I was curious how OpenRocket would fair with my own actual flights.

Since I've been using the Estes Mongoose for all my flights with my altimeter I decided to create the Mongoose on OpenRocket.



After I was satisfied with the result I entered the data e.g. weather conditions and generated the graph.

This came out:


I then compared it to the actual flight which looks like this:


I'd say OpenRocket came out pretty darn close

Here the .ork file of my Mongoose: OpenRocket .ork file

There are 2 things that I had tweak however:

• The main parachute decent rate in OpenRocket needed to be adjusted to the rate I recorded with my altimeter.
• The same goes for break-away recovery which I simulated in OpenRocket with a streamer.

I will enjoy creating other rockets in OpenRocket that I will be flying with my altimeter to compare with.

Does anyone know if the 3D view in OpenRocket can be set as default?

Leo said:

Does anyone know if the 3D view in OpenRocket can be set as default?

Click to expand...

IIRC from the discussion on the dev list, no. This was due to the instability with some video drivers.

Thanks Brian.

I flew my rocket/altimeter last Sunday and then compared it to the simulation in OpenRocket:





OpenRocket: 192 meters (630 feet) and max. velocity 59.6 m/s (195.5 f/s)
Actual flight: 200 meters (656 feet) and max. velocity 54.4 m/s (178.8 f/s)

Again pretty close results