Originally posted by 11Bravo
Category 1: Materials- Anyone use either Nomex or Kevlar parachutes and just not have to worry about wadding, pistons, or baffles?
Category 2: Guidance- Is the "no guidance" thing a law or regulation (either of these being governmental in origin) or just a rule some whiz-bang rocket scientist came up with for the national organizations?
Would a radio controlled, guided parachute be considered covered by this law/regulation/rule?
For the inspiration behind the guided parachute idea, see-
https://www.paraflite.com/html/delivery.html
Specifically, see the link under the bottom picture "5000 lb Precision Guided Aerial Delivery System" and have a look at the movie clip to which it points.
I'm sure that a person could come up with a small, steerable parafoil and an RC setup to accomplish this.
Be for bigger rockets, but sure would be nice to guide the thing to a landing next to your lawn chair.
Waddya'll think?
Greg
1. Never heard of such a beast. The things I've gotten made of that stuff are pretty loose weave. They wouldn't make good chutes except for large sized, and then somewhat inefficient.
2. There is definitely no rule, regulation or law against guidance in rockets either ascending or descending. None. Not from any rocket organization, government agency, or professional safety/security/alien-presence-monitoring organization. There may have been something relating to guidance, possibly in NFPA 1127 (someone suggested that as a possibility) but there is none now anywhere that I can find or that anyone will point out to me. There are still people who claim there is. This flies in the face of at least one NARAM R&D project which used guidance as a "sun seeker", not to mention the obvious R/C controlled boost gliders. What there is, is many people who immediately jump to the conclusion that any attempt to do anything remotely (no pun intended) like guidance will be intercepted and investigated by the government, who, like the people who're having these imaginings, will conclude that anything "guided" will be used against a hard target, and so They Will Come Down Harder On Us Than They Have Already. (Note to mods: this is not a political statement, but rather one of observation of peoples' reactions to this topic. I have a political stance on this, a rather vehement one, but that's irrelevant to these observations). See the rec.model.rockets thread "Subject: Where does this "No Guidance" stuff come from?" for my asking the same question, and getting material supporting the above observations, more noise than signal, and one reasonable but vague suggested possibility for the origin of this rocketry urban myth. Also included is a lengthy rant by me regarding this topic, peoples reactions to it, and more politically oriented foot stomping than anyone should be allowed to enjoy. And I did. And that pretty much ended the thread.
I've also tried emailing people associated with a prominent rocketry related web site that makes this statement, asking them where this comes from and if they have a reference, past or present, but never received an answer.
Go ahead and use active, passive, internal or external guidance on anything going up, coming down or arcing over apogee. If anyone, from common civilian to Men In Black, has a problem with that, feel free to make them aware the problem is theirs. Before, I only wanted to develop some guidance systems out of scientific interest. Now I'm darn certain to do so just so I can give some people aneurysms by telling them all about it in public.
Orbital mind control lasers. That's the only way to explain it. And obviously my tin foil helment has so far protected me from having this anti-guidance thing implanted in my brain.
I'll stop and go take my meds now.