Against All Odds - Bottle Skyrocket
Date: 2006-01-12
Description
A completely conventional bottle rocket, Rich Wolter tooling and Pyrotube 1/4" ID x 2" casing, but with a rather ambitious looking payload.
The header contained 4 3/8" D1 Glitter stars and about a quarter gram of loose granulated Whistle Burst.
The propellant for the motor was my Contaminated Meal batch. From static tests this motor is typically capable of putting out 200-250 g of thrust, for about 1/3 of a second - its core-burning phase. The payload in this case was a very unaerodynamic looking blob of orange paper, weighing about 6.5 g! A previous flight test with a 7 g payload suggested this payload wasn't going to make it to a reasonable height.
After this 7 g disaster I did my best to reduce the mass of the payload. Some wadding was removed from the top of the canister, instead of the triangle fold it was originally closed with the top was now cinched with another clove hitch. This allowed a little bit of paper to be removed as well resulting in a full gram of saved mass.
Comments
Worked Great.
I didn't have much hope for this rocket, it was lifting more than twice its propellant mass! But it suprised me. It delivered the stars to a good height and the D1 Glitter put on a very nice performance.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Test Video | video/x-msvideo | 2.875 Mbytes |
| Pre-Diet Picture | image/jpeg | 47.470 kbytes |