Bryce, Jared --
First off, congrats on your 30k flight. Now, a couple of points:
1. Tripoli has over 14,000 members. Most of them fly rockets. Since you both spend a ton of time on this forum, you may have noticed that it's fairly common for full grown adults with full time jobs to speak of how they are limited in their advancement within the hobby by funding. While it's fine to ask for help and clearly many people on here are willing, able, and glad to help out college kids (I am a college kid too, for what it's worth) your time might be better spent in other ways, either earning money for yourself like everyone else in the world or by re-evaluating your project, which leads me to my next point.
2. $4,400 to fly a 4" minimum diameter project is a patently ridiculous number, and I will speak from experience here because I built and flew my first 4" minimum diameter rocket over five years ago, my junior year of high school. The CTI N5800 is just a basic high solids, aluminized propellant (70/16 if memory serves). I built a 4" carbon project and flew it on an O motor with 58" of a propellant more aluminized than C-Star. The rocket held together just fine at over Mach 3 and the whole project cost me less than $1500. It didn't have a titanium tip. In fact, it had plastic rail buttons which only melted a little bit.
3. Please don't insult everyone's intelligence by asking them to fund the project of a "poor college kid," and then when people try to help you, a) make excuses about why you can't raise the money yourself and b) refuse to share details of your project to people kind enough to show interest in funding it because you think you're doing something proprietary. As you are inexperienced flyers asking others (in many cases, more experienced flyers) to fund your project with their hourly wage, you have zero right to talk with any sort of authority, especially when a cursory review of the "secret details" you've blessed the public with quickly reveals your inexperience ("we need titanium because sims show it approaches the melting point of aluminum," "last time we used plexiglass fin guides in the curing oven and they warped, wood will work better." If you want to grab people's attention with your project and then withhold details you have every right to do so, but then don't come shamelessly asking for help.
This project is not that difficult. For what it's worth, it won't come close to 60,000 feet, regardless of what sims say, especially with a motor like the N5800 which accelerates quickly in the thick air close to the ground (that's one reason why so many MD projects shred on this motor). So, you might be well served to lose the lemonade-stand fundraising strategy playing off people's good will and spend more time reducing costs from the astronomical $4,400 estimate to a point where you can pay for it yourselves. Between three people it should be easy. One way to do this might be asking the advice of those more experienced -- then you would learn what people have and haven't been able to get away with, learn what's really necessary, and better know where to spend your money. Or, if you're set on being Super High Tech! and Awesome! and sticking with the $4,400 number, all the time you've spent with your shameless self-promotion, website set-up, and forum posting, there's a million ways you could have made that money already, especially among three people. As Mitch said, I manage to hold a job, be a college athlete, and take 18 credit hours. Doable.
One way to dramatically reduce costs is by not flying a commercial motor. You can borrow hardware (a much more reasonable request than borrowing 4 grand), or, since it sounds like you have machining capability, make your own. Find a member closeby with mixing apparatus and mix your own propellant. Can't fly EX in California? Go to Nevada and fly it with Aeropac. Figure it out.
Last summer, I had to buy a car, so it drained my bank account a bit. I had longstanding plans to attend Balls and wasn't about to cancel, but I could no longer afford to complete the 6" MD project I was working on. Still wanting to get decent performance, I bought a Competitor and Intimidator 3 ($129 each) and used the kit parts I didn't need to make an interstage. The two-stage design allowed me to use common 3" hardware I already had and still have a Balls-worthy project. I tweaked the propellant and grain geometry to get max performance, used some scrap carbon on the fins and had a two-stage M-to-N Balls project ready to fly for under $400. Sure, some of that was because I used parts I already had, but you all just flew a 3" minimum diameter so you clearly already have electronics and the like. In the end the accelerometer gave up the ghost and fired the apogee charge on the sustainer early, just after sustainer motor burnout at around 35k' when it was still traveling over Mach 2, so the sustainer shredded. But with good construction fundamentals and through careful design (the interstage coupler, the weakest joint, was double-walled by the sustainer motor hardware, etc.) I was able to make a 55k-capable Balls project out of parts designed to fly on J motors (and priced accordingly) and make it work. Of course, I'm not sure why I went to the trouble -- I could have set up a website and asked people on The Rocketry Forum for money. Wish I'd thought of that.
There are many on this forum who for some reason take it upon themselves to always tell people to back down from a project. "You're not experienced enough!" "Try something smaller first!" etc. Believe me, that's not my intent. As you all surely found out from your 3", which to my knowledge was in itself a jump up from what you had been flying, common sense can get you a long way and most "extreme" projects really aren't that difficult, especially if you're flying commercial motors. So, go for it.
Good luck!
