New Star Tests - Stars On Small Rockets
Date: 2006-05-03
Description
A quick "flight test" of new stars. One new batch of D1 Glitter and two completely new compositions; one experimental chlorate based colour comp and Winokur 20 which I've been wanting to try for a while. All were well stargun tested, these rockets were just for fun and to see how the stars looked high in the sky.
Three essentially identical 1/4" rockets were made on Rich Wolter "Short" tooling, charged with Contaminated Meal, bamboo kebab stick and blackmatch fused as usual. (The Chlorate Red rocket did have a longer delay section by about one increment.)
The payloads were simple, just a nose extension tube, a few stars in the tube with a pinch of corning dust to push them out (omitted with the Chlorate Red stars).
One rocket carried 6.5 mm pumped Winokur 20, another 5 mm pumped D1 Glitter, and the last assorted small cut Chlorate Red stars. The glitter stars were both primed with BP meal, the Chlorate Red stars with Sulfurless BP meal.
Comments
Worked great!
The Winokur 20 stars are wonderful. They make a rushing/crackling sound as they burn, the flashes are few, but very bright and strobe-like. The colour is a beautiful gold, not dissimilar to D1, but much brighter. Basically this star trades density for brightness and a unique flash-reaction effect.
The D1 stars are perhaps a little too fast for the size I made them. For close proximity or hard breaks they are very nice, their usual beautiful dense gold glittering, however the rockets carried the stars very high, so the effect visible on the video is diminished somewhat.
The Chlorate Red is very bright. It has a huge flame envelope, and is faster than I would have imagined. I was actually aiming for a slower star that would give a good effect at small sizes - in this respect it is quite good, it has excellent brightness for an organically fuelled star and a 1/4" one burns about 1.5-2 seconds. The colour saturation is excellent! No special attention was taken to the purity of the sulfurless prime components so this is perhaps suprising. However, the Chlorate in the stars themselves was home-made and extremely pure, and the stars were dried well before the prime was rolled on.
Attachments
| title | type | size |
|---|---|---|
| Winokur 20 Rocket | video/x-msvideo | 2.718 Mbytes |
| D1 Glitter Rocket | video/x-msvideo | 2.021 Mbytes |
| Chlorate Red Rocket | video/x-msvideo | 2.435 Mbytes |
| Pre-Test Picture | image/jpeg | 53.772 kbytes |