Supersonic Paint Remover

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SparkyVT

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I don't post much, but a few folks have been asking for this video. After 9 months of development work, I flew my minimum diameter 3inch project at Airfest on an EX M2500 with about 7500 N-s. It hit somewhere between Mach 1.92 to 1.98 and topped out at 18,454ft.

My onboard flight computer mimics the functionality of a TeleMega, though poorly by comparison. Live telemetry worked great, and you can hear us calling out the altitude in the first video clip. The second video clip is from the onboard camera looking down. Sorry, it spins quite a bit.

[YOUTUBE]RWzlSlwZqlI[/YOUTUBE]

I'm not much of an artist, so my paint job was ill conceived and rushed. If you watch carefully, you can see the supersonic airstream strip the paint off the leading edges of my fins. Its interesting to see how it didn't happen all at once, but started near the root and progressed down the fin.

The telemetry system sent the final GPS coordinates to the ground station and we recovered it easily about 1.1 miles away. Thanks to Chris Maier and the West Texas Rocketry crew for all your help!

Enjoy!

Fins.jpg
 
Awesome flight! It's really cool to see the paint peel away during the flight. Scars are cool!
 
Great flight! Do you have any photos of the video camera mounting? I've been wondering how much you can push an externally mounted camera! :)
 
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