JMZawodny
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2012
- Messages
- 915
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I have always been fascinated with the Nike Hercules. It is just a cool, powerful looking rocket. I think most fliers agree and some have thought of actually building one. You can still find the 1/12th-Scale RoachWerks kit, but I was thinking of something a little bigger. Initially I had planned to build a 1/4-Scale NH since you can get the scale 4.1" diameter FWFG tube for the booster motors. That would have been a monster (and maybe something I'll reconsider after gaining experience with the current project). I spent a fair amount of time researching the available drawings and scale data. You quickly come across drawing by R. S. Barker, Peter Alway, or Stephen Maire - the latter being the best IMHO. None of these are fully consistent and you need to sort through the various errors. All of them appear to get the shape of the Nose Cone wrong and I'll come back to this point later in the thread. I'm fortunate to have an accessible Hercules at a local outdoor museum which I plan to use to double check my design. I want this project to be a two-stage with both the booster and sustainer having dual-deploy recovery systems. My first question was what scale to model this in. I put together some crude designs in RockSim for a 1/10th, 1/6th, 1/5th, and 1/4th scale just to see how big they were and how much room I had to work with for the recovery systems. The materials, cost of the parts, motor choices, and predicted performance were also considerations. I ended up selecting 1/6th-scale (actually 16.3%) for this project. The booster will have four 38mm motors and the sustainer a 54mm. This is going to be my summer project, except I have no idea which year that summer will be when it is done. Here are a couple of screen captures from RockSim.