mtnmanak
™
- Joined
- May 5, 2020
- Messages
- 2,067
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Looks great. Just finished the 4” myself. Cant wait to fly it at Metra or MDRA. Just needs to warm up so I can paint. I also saw the discussion on retainers a few pages back. I found my standard aeropack 54mm was really loose. I see wildman has a RA54P-TW listed on their site. Pretty sure that is the one I need. I didnt want to fill the gap with JB weld and hope it held. Wish I had thought about the tail cone after seeing yours!
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your doing a fine job there, young man!
Great thread, thanks for sharing all of this information! Will start my build soon.
Here is the video from the Neutron Star flights over the weekend at MDRA:
Launch 1 (20 FEB 2021): Loki J-474
Launch 2 (20 FEB 2021): Aerotech K-400
Launch 3 (21 FEB 2021): Aerotech L-1090
Weather was a big factor this weekend. On Saturday, the temp was in the upper 20's, but the 15+MPH wind pushed the wind chill down into the teens and also pushed our rockets a long ways. Sunday, however, was absolutely perfect. Got into the low 40's and, by afternoon, zero wind.
On the first launch, the deployment bag wrapped around the main chute causing a partial failure. It is hard to see in the video, but the chute opens fully for a split second, then it collapses as the cord wraps around the shroud lines. Luckily, there was no damage to the rocket.
On the second flight on the K-400, the wind was extremely strong and the rocket landed about a mile away. Long walk through a very frozen corn field, but everything worked properly on that flight. I was using a Marco Polo tracker in my rockets this weekend and it really came in handy for this flight!
On the last launch on the L-1090, it was picture perfect and landed right back in the parking lot. In the video, you will hear 7,000 feet mentioned a couple times. That was not the correct data. I had run the sim in both TC and Rocksim. TC indicated 7200 feet and Rocksim indicated 9400 feet. I was going with the 9400 feet, but inadvertently wrote the TC data on the flight card. Actual flight data recovered from the RRC3s indicated almost exactly 9400 feet and 708 MPH. The rocket landed in the parking lot with the booster section on one side of a car and the payload section on the other side of the car with the shock cord draped perfectly over the roof of the car. The nosecone does hit a minivan roof (can see it in the video), but it hit flatly and didn't leave a mark. Luckily, no cars were injured in the making of this video!
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