Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Tantalizing Tweet from Jolly Logic

This morning on Twitter...


In case you're unfamiliar, the Chute Release is a rocket recovery device. Using a rubber band, it holds your parachute in a tight bundle. When the nose cone and parachute are ejected from the rocket at apogee, the Chute Release prevents the parachute from opening right away.

You select a specified altitude at which the Chute Release lets go of the parachute. That means, if your rocket flies to, say 1500 feet, you can have the parachute open at, say 500 feet. The rocket tumbles to the set altitude and the chute opens.

Which means you have to walk much less far to retrieve your rocket. It can even prevent your losing a rocket, because a chute opening high up can drift so far, it may leave the field.

It allows you to do something similar to high power rocketry's dual deployment, where a small, drogue parachute is deployed at apogee, and a large main chute deploys lower down. Dual deployment is more complicated and uses black powder charges that some people don't want to mess with. It's often not used in mid- or low-power rockets (though there are some exceptions), and you have to build the rocket a little differently.

The current Chute Release fits a BT-60 sized body tube (1.637 inch in diameter). I've got lots of BT-55 rockets I'd love to recover with a Chute Release.

In other words, I hope this happens!

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