- Joined
- May 9, 2018
- Messages
- 97
- Reaction score
- 106
I grew up on Estes (like the Astron series), graduated to mid-power rocketry when my son got interested, and recently took up HPR when students in my department wanted to go for NASA's SLI competition. I do a lot of scratch builds 'cause I like designing. But I went with t a kit for my first HPR only because I wanted to do it pretty quickly. I chose Madcow's Super DX3 for a number of reasons including:
1) Big enough that you have room to learn stuff like inside fillets without the constraints of a 54mm motor mount in a 76 mm tube
2) Can fly for L1 with single deployment and no electronics and then add e-bay and learn dual deployment while still flying relatively inexpensive L1 motors (I did crash my first dual deployment flight but was able to rebuild it.)
3) Sturdy enough for your L2 flight once you've got dual deployment down
I've followed that with a 3" fiberglass kit, again for expediency. I picked the Composite Warehouse Prometheus, but there are many other options available. I'll be flying this at Texas Shootout over Memorial Day weekend if all goes well.
I'll probably be building mostly scratch built stuff from now on. That's how my low- and mid-power rocketry has gone. But the above combination provided a good HPR introduction sequence for me.
1) Big enough that you have room to learn stuff like inside fillets without the constraints of a 54mm motor mount in a 76 mm tube
2) Can fly for L1 with single deployment and no electronics and then add e-bay and learn dual deployment while still flying relatively inexpensive L1 motors (I did crash my first dual deployment flight but was able to rebuild it.)
3) Sturdy enough for your L2 flight once you've got dual deployment down
I've followed that with a 3" fiberglass kit, again for expediency. I picked the Composite Warehouse Prometheus, but there are many other options available. I'll be flying this at Texas Shootout over Memorial Day weekend if all goes well.
I'll probably be building mostly scratch built stuff from now on. That's how my low- and mid-power rocketry has gone. But the above combination provided a good HPR introduction sequence for me.