Flechette and (New) Athena - Two New on the Fleet Page

I've added two new small models to my fleet. Details about the whole current and past fleet can be found here.

Flechette (Prototype)

I was digging through a box of spare parts, and found some leftover BT-20 nose cones. My last BT-20 rocket, the Estes Hi Flier (see below) was lost long ago. BT-20 is just the right diameter to hold a standard A, B or C 18mm model rocket motor, and a rocket which uses that tube as a body tube is known as minimum diameter - it's only as fat as it needs to be to accommodate the motor. Because of that, rockets of this type tend to be much lighter and have less drag, so they can indeed fly very high.

I like big rockets just as much as the next guy, but I felt inspired to use these parts, so I whipped up this design.

Flechette (French for "Dart") is a two-stage rocket that may top 2,300 feet on two C6 motors. That makes it quite a performer for less than six dollars. The finished version will carry a small payload - the Perfectflite FireFly altimeter. For an upcoming project for this blog, I need some vehicles I can build quickly and cheaply, fly repeatedly, and easily replace if they get lost or damaged, and Flechette fits the bill.

The prototype was built with leftover parts and has no payload - it's just a sport model that goes up and (presumably) comes down. I built it a day after making the design, with the intention of testing the method I came up with for coupling the booster to the main stage - or sustainer. Since it was cheap and didn't take ages to build, I'm OK with losing it, as long as it works.

I had to miss the last launch, so as of this writing, Flechette has not flown yet, but I have acquired the parts to build 6-10 of them, including the payloads. Even without a booster stage, the rocket will fly 1,500 feet and still fulfill the purposes of the upcoming project. And I like the little sucker - reminds me of a tiny sounding rocket.

Estes Athena

If you've read the My Fleet of Rockets page before, or if you scroll to the bottom, you'll see that one of the first model rockets I owned - and lost - was the Estes Athena, a simple white and blue Ready-To-Fly rocket, which flies amazingly high on C6 motors.

Before I was really bitten by the rocketry bug, I had flown a few with my friend Chad, and picked up some RTF models on deep discount at Michael's Crafts.

While I really prefer to build rockets these days, I was sad to lose the Athena. Of the various rather similar RTF Estes rockets you can buy, I guess it was a favorite. It's fun and easy - pop in a motor and launch. RTF rockets are also great for doing quick demo launches for kids and non-rocketry friends you're trying to convert to the hobby.

I won a new one after completing an online survey by the MIT Rocket Team, and picked it up when I took a tour of their rocket lab. Other winners - one from Alabama and one from Wales - received MIT Rocket Team mission patches.

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Launched Three, Lost Three

My fleet has grown smaller.

On Wednesday, Chad and another friend - Jeff - and I launched some rockets. It was going to be either Wednesday or Thursday, but the weather looked bad on Thursday, so we had a small launch window.

Unfortunately, while the winds seemed light, they were stronger than I thought, especially at altitude.

This was my first loss. Losing rockets is an inevitable hazard of rocketry, but this was my first, and man, was it a bummer!

But I learned a couple things on this launch. The first is Check your Go Fever. If the winds look bad, you don't have to launch.

The second is that Chad is a terrible videographer. The footage of the launches is terrible. If my girlfriend had been in town, I'd have some spectacular footage to show you. Fortunately, Jeff got some good pictures.

Chad, as I've reported here before, has lost most of his rockets, and I think he was secretly happy this happened to me. I was actually glad he was there to witness it, so he'd stop whining "Oh, I'm Daniel, and I never lose rockets!"

I'd brought all my bigger rockets, including a few I'd never launched before. Once I noticed it was a little windy, though, I had to make a decision what I was going to try to launch. I was not about to go with the Quest Quadrunner, after all the trouble I'd gone through building it. And replacing it would cost me nearly fifty bucks.

The first loss was the most painful. It was the just-built Cosmic Explorer with an E motor upgrade.

On the left: my original Cosmic Explorer which can only hold up to a C motor.
On the right: the just-completed Cosmic Explorer with an E-sized motor mount -
capable of going three times as high

I knew this was a risk, with a bit of wind. But I'd gotten one of the fins on slightly crooked, and had a little problem with the paint job. And I have two more of them I can build, so I said "screw it! Let's launch this sucker!"

 
The first thing that happened was that my launch controller wasn't working. I gave it a little shake, and heard some rattling around inside. "That doesn't sound good," Jeff said. I'm not the best at soldering... Fortunately, I had my Estes launch controllers with me. No way to do a cluster launch with that, but I was nervous about those rockets anyway.

The flight was amazing. About 1800 feet or more, straight up. That E9 black powder motor made a huge sound (E is all I've gotten up to at this point, so I'm still impressed by it), lots of smoke, and the thing just soared.

But then, there was no tracking smoke, and after a moment, we lost sight of the rocket completely!

Then, for a second, we caught sight of the parachute. It was so high up and so tiny that I thought it hadn't opened all the way. But it had. 1800 feet might be a low guestimate, and I'm basing it on my OpenRocket simulation. The Cosmic Explorer has a big red parachute, and it was so far away.

After a second, I lost sight of it again. We kept searching the skies for it, and it just vanished. It had headed northwest, but that's all I knew. If it had crashed to the ground, or gotten stuck in a tree, I'd have been sad about that, but the fact that it simply disappeared was... I don't know. I just wanted to know where it had gone.

Sarcasm: Chad reaches out with eyes closed to catch the rocket as it falls straight down...

OK, I knew launching the Cosmic Explorer might be a bad idea. But I decided to keep going. Go Fever.

Next I put the 3D Rocketry Nautilus II on the pad.

This, I thought, would be fine. We have a large flying field, the Nautilus II is fatter and only takes a D motor, and it has a smaller parachute. Besides, it had suffered some major fin damage on its first flight, so I decided to press on with it.

Again, the flight was awesome. Much straighter than the first time I'd launched it, and very high - though not out of sight.

As soon as the chute opened, I thought, oh, no... It's going to go over the trees at the end of the field!

Chad ran to see if he could catch the rocket, which he likes to do. He's like a labrador retriever, and we just can't keep him off the couch...

Then, instead of going over the trees, the Nautilus II landed in the tops of them.

"Rocket-eating trees" are a commonly mentioned hazard in rocketry, and Chad is the Charlie Brown of rockets, but this was my first loss to the trees. And this is a good, open field, so it's not a huge risk here, but it happened.

The only trees to worry about are at the north end of the field.

 Chad ran to see if he could recover the rocket. There it was, tantalizingly dangling from the very end of a thin, outer branch. If the wind changed direction, it might have fallen right out, but the wind was holding the rocket securely on the branch.

I decided to try one last thing. I had the Estes Athena in the bottom of the box. This is a ready-to-fly model I got for $7. I thought If I can get this back, maybe I'll continue launching. If not, I didn't build it, so I won't be sad about it. I tilted the pad slightly into the wind, so that it would fly less high, but possibly come back and land on the field.

All rockets turn somewhat into the wind. For n00bs, this is referred to as "weathercocking." It happens whether you want it to or not. But you can take advantage of it - you can tilt into the wind, and have the rocket return closed to the launch area, or tilt it slightly with the wind, and the rocket will straighten up as it weathercocks, and achieve a higher altitude than it would if launched straight up in windy conditions.

It did weathercock into the wind, and I had hope of getting it back. But the chute opened, and we saw it streak across the sky - the wind must have picked up a lot! It moved so fast, it was like watching Sputnik cross the night sky. It flew over the trees at the end of the field, right over Chad's head, and disappeared.

Chad and Jeff had to leave, and I spent the next hour and a half hiking corn fields looking for the Cosmic Explorer. It had traveled northwest, so I felt I had a good chance of recovering it.

I walked up the hill to the trees and saw the Nautilus II dangling from the branch. I had to cross some train tracks and find a way through the thick brush to the corn field. I walked the whole thing, and up into some grass and woods. Eventually, I realized I shouldn't spend a lot of time hiking around on someone's property, so I hiked back.

I kept thinking I saw it, but it kept turning out to be broken corn stalks gleaming in the falling sun. In any case, I never saw that red chute flutter in the breeze.

Obviously, nothing is green there right now...

I realized that thing could have gone for a mile or two! Or it could have landed somewhere where I couldn't get to or just didn't notice.

I drove around the area, trying to see if I could spot it in an open patch of land. Nothing...

It was only after searching for the Cosmic Explorer that I realized how bummed out I was to lose it. I only got to launch it once, I thought. You can launch any rocket once. The trick is launching it more than once.

I drove back the next day, hopeful that a change in the wind had knocked the Nautilus II from the branch it hung from. Instead, it had become more tangled, and on this day it twisted in the breeze. Today, it's raining pretty hard, so even if it eventually comes down, it will probably be ruined.

So, I lost a few rockets.

But when I got home that night, I started fiddling around with OpenRocket. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see how quickly I could design a little rocket for altitude and speed, using just an E motor and parts I already had. In about twenty minutes, I came up with a design that should top 2600 feet and go Mach .58, or 3500 feet at Mach .61 if I add a D motor booster. I called it Sounder I (for now), and I may lose it, but it was easy and cheap, and it's kind of an experiment. I'm mostly interested in building larger rockets, but I wanted to play around with a simple, high performance design.

I started building it the next day.

Sounder I sustainer, nearly done. I built this in an evening.

I also started building the first scratch design I came up with months ago, a 3-motor cluster called the Trident A.

The Trident A motor mount, part of which will be exposed to view

So, I'm replenishing the fleet.

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Since I started this blog, I've been either too tired from work, or too busy working on or reading about rockets to actually post anything. And I've gone from knowing nothing and having done nothing to acquiring a lot of new knowledge and having done a lot of stuff, and it kind of reminds me of when I've written in journals every day for weeks, and then stopped. Then a lot of stuff happens. Then I think, Do I do a recap? For, like, posterity?

Well, I'll probably get to that. Since I don't know who, if anyone, will actually read this, and a lot of people I've told about my rocket obsession have a lot of questions - "How do they, like, work?" "Do you, like, throw them away after you launch them?" -  I'll probably start simply. Apologies to any advanced rocketeers (yes, that's what they're called) who stumble upon this blog in the early stages. I'll get more technical as I go on.

Anyway, since this is a rocket blog, I should probably start by showing you some rockets. These are the ones that I first bought. Just to kick things off.

My first few were ready-made rockets which required little or no assembly. The very first was part of what's called a "launch set." This includes a launch pad, a launch controller (a little electronic box with a couple of buttons on it you push to make the rocket launch), plus an easy-to-assemble rocket, all for less than the price of a pad and a controller you'd buy separately. I got this exact one as a kid, and never put it together.

I'm not wild about the rocket, partly because it included stickers. The kind you can't move once you've touched any part of it to the rocket. This is what messed up my toy Millennium Falcon when I was a kid. It's called the Silver Arrow:

I mean, the thing flies great. But it's mostly made of plastic, and I didn't get any of the stickers on straight. I even messed up the purple underneath by trying to adjust one:

Also, one of the fins fell off a few days ago.

Anyway, not to complain. It's a cheap kit I got for about 20 bucks and I've used the launch pad for much cooler rockets since.

Next, I found a bunch of premade rockets on clearance at a Michael's Crafts here in town. This was before I became obsessed with building my own. These are all Estes rockets. For years, Estes was one of maybe two or three model rocket companies, and they're still probably the best known. Today, if you're starting out, and Googling "model rocket," Estes is about all you'll encounter at first. But as I've discovered, there are a lot of great, non-Estes companies who also make rockets.

These are actually all great, and fly really well.

This is the EX-200. It's a tiny little thing, and when you load it, it's packed so tight, you think it might just explode. But it doesn't. It flies fast and straight, and pretty high, on a tiny little A motor. Cost me 4 bucks!

Motors, in large part, are labeled by letters. A is the least powerful, and they go up by each letter. This is n00b information. I'll elaborate later.

This is the Patriarch. 7 bucks. I love this thing. It flies really straight, and it's heavier, so you can really watch it ascend. Some of the lighter ones go really high, but in less than a second it's so high you can't see it any more.

I nearly lost this one on the first launch, because the shock cord (which holds the nose cone to the body of the rocket... if you don't know, I'll explain later) wasn't securely tied. So the body came crashing down (it was fine) and the nose cone drifted across the fields on its parachute and was nearly lost, before being rescued by the 5-year-old (Cody), who was with us. Whew!

Estes Athena. Awesome rocket. Flies really high. This was either 4 or 7 dollars (I forget which). The bottom sticker comes off a bit - I need to tape that down one of these days.

I used this rocket for a little experiment I'll detail in a later post. Let's just say, it was a successful experiment I'm pretty proud of.

This is the rocket that gave me the bug for rocket building. It's a re-release of a classic Estes rocket called "Der Red Max." The design is based loosely on the look of the Red Baron's airplane, and the thing is freaking cool. Nice, thick airframe. Awesome decals. Black and red look. And the ascent is awe-inspiring. The kicker is the skull-and-crossbones parachute.

I saw this rocket on Amazon for about 16 or 18 bucks, and they only had one left at the time. I was worried about building my own, but it was too cool to pass up, so I bought it. I followed the instructions, and loved the process of gluing and priming and painting... I was terrified I'd get the fins on crooked - in fact, you have to look really close to see that one is slightly to the fore of the others, but it doesn't interfere with a great flight - and I was terrified of the decals. But I did some research, took my time, and it came out great. This is my baby.

Here are some more views of the decals.

As you can see, I did get a little chip in the paint job from a hard landing after the parachute melted to itself:

After building this one, I started researching how to get a better finish. Up close, this rocket has a lot of texture you might not want. And you can see the wood grain in the fins. I found out that you can fill that in with a few techniques. My second build was Estes Crossfire ISX. I built this one because Chad had one, and it was the first rocket I'd launched. We lost his first one after the second launch, and Chad got a new one.

The crossfire is supposed to look like this:

It's the color scheme Chad went with. I wanted mine to look different, and once I realized you can make a rocket look any way you want, I decided on my own paint job. (Besides, Chad's paint jobs are terrible. He rushes them, has no patience for "craftsmanship," and he uses paint brushes. Paint brushes, for crying out loud!!)

Mine looks like this:

I contacted Chris Michielssen of modelrocketbuilding.blogspot.com, a really gifted rocket builder, for advice on this nose cone color I had in mind. He had a tip or two, but said it would be pretty tricky. When I sent him my pictures, he posted them on his blog. I totally geeked out in nerdy pride over that one!

I also rounded the leading edges of the fins and moved the launch lug (I'll explain later, fellow n00bs) for greater aerodynamic performance, so that my rocket could defeat Chad's rocket in a competition. We finally did this on Sunday, and I think they were about equal. From where I was standing, mine appeared to go a bit higher. From where others were standing, his did. But we were all really too close to the launch pad to tell.

Here's a detail of that cool nose cone mask I did:

My most recent competed build was a cheap, impulse buy. An Ested Mini Honest John, which is a scale model of an early U.S. nuclear missile. I got it because it looked cute on the package, and was about 9 bucks. I considered this a practice rocket, since what I'm working on now is mostly my finishes:

These are all "Skill Level 1" (according to Estes) rockets, which means that they require the least amount of experience building model rockets.

I'm currently building two more rockets and have three I haven't started, plus one on the way in the mail. I'm just about to bump myself up a skill level, people!

Well, there you have it. Rockets.

I know this entry was pretty long, which is probably some kind of blogging crime, but I'm new to this. Just figured I should actually show some rockets on my new rocket blog.

Here's the whole (completed) fleet: