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Day 134 - 7 Years, Inverter Flights, Axion G4
Date:
9th June 2013
Location:Doonside, NSW, Australia
Conditions:Sunny, very light winds < 5km/h
early,
20C
Team Members at Event:GK,
PK, Paul K, and John K.
7 Years
This week we celebrated 7 years since our
very
first launch in the backyard. Water
rockets continues
to be a
fun journey and a rewarding hobby. It's also been great
watching the boys grow up and become more
and more helpful during launches and
with rocket preparation. We
have compiled a video from the last 7 years
of things that haven't gone
exactly to plan:
Here is a collection of photos of how the
rockets and boys have grown over the years.
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
Day 2
Day 9
Day 9
Day 15
Day 16
Day 18
Day 20
Day 25
Day 29
Day 30
Day 33
Day 44
Day 52
Day 56
Day 57
Day 61
Day 65
Day 66
Day 71
Day 76
Day 76
Day 77
Day78
Day 83
Day 83
Day 88
Day 92
Day 92
Day 94
Day 94
Day 98
Day 103
Day 104
Day 105
Day 111
Day 113
Day114
Day115
Day 117
Day 118
Day 118
Day 120
Day 121
Day 129
Day 130
Day 131
Day 132
Day 133
Launch Day
We finally got back to launching again
after a short break. On Sunday it was a beautiful morning for launching
rockets at Doonside. The skies were clear with only a
very light breeze. We took the Inverter out
for another spin to try to get
some video looking straight down. From the
last flights we noticed that the rocket was
very stable as it descended so we put one
downward facing camera on the rocket and one
sideways. Under parachute they would swap
roles and look sideways and downward
respectively.
The rocket was launched at 120psi and
again with a nice slow take off it flew a nice
arc right over the car park and the
parachute opened past apogee but in plenty of time.
The rocket reached an
altitude of 407 feet. The view
from both cameras was good although the MD80
clone looked like it is out of focus. We
haven't used this camera for a long time and
I recall that the last launch we used it on,
it was also out of focus. It may be that is
how it came from
the factory. I did notice though in the
video that close
up things were nicely in focus. This may not
be too bad actually as we
will use the camera in another experiment we
have planned. Paul did a great job of
photographing the rocket during launch
as shown below.
We set the rocket up again for a second
launch with an identical set-up. The rocket
flew to 384 feet and landed at almost
the same place. Again good video was
obtained from the on-board cameras.
For the next launch we prepared a flight
of the Axion G4 rocket with foam, although we didn't
use a jet foaming configuration. The rocket
was built from 2 spliced pairs and a spliced
quad reinforced with fiberglass. Launched at 200psi you could visibly
tell that it had much more power than our
regular launches. The rocket
went straight up but spun quite a bit. It
reached an altitude of 673 feet ( 205 m ) which wasn't
too bad for only 200psi. We also had a
camera attached to the side to look down. On
the way down the parachute tangled a little
but fully opened a couple of seconds later
so it came down without a problem.
By the time we set the rocket up for a
second flight the wind had picked up and
blew directly towards the rocket eating trees. We
decided not to launch and walk away with the
rocket rather than have it get stuck in the
tree. Paul had also launched 3 of his pyro
rockets throughout the day. The near
vertical 2 stage flight was particularly
good.
We also used the
LaRF again to find one
of the club member's pyro rockets that
landed ~1380 feet
(420m) from the pad. The attenuated laser
was still very easy to see from that
distance and the beam spread looked like it
was around 10cm.
