I'm astonished and pleased to note that I experienced two Saturdays in a row of impeccable flying weather. Holtville and Lucerne were similarly windless and a comfortable mid-70s all day. It turns out that I've had this CTI 6800M3700 White Thunder reload in storage since November 2009. Oops... tempus fugit! I was throughly committed to preventing additional aging so I packed only that necessary to fly this vicious motor in my trusty DarkStar Extreme. I bonded the grains into the liner the night before but, despite that and getting to the lakebed by 8:30AM, I still didn't fly until 11:30AM. I was totally on my own and was unable to shoot photos but Gerald Meux was LCO and he and I agree that must have been an ~10' flame during the blistering ascent. I lucked out for once and dual-deploy put 'er down less than 1/4 mile away from the pad:
I couldn't get the GPS transmitter working for some reason so you'll have to take my word for it. The ARTS2 (table, graph, motor analysis, CD) and Raven3 250G(table, graph) averaged to the following maxima:
- Altitude, AGL: 15,846' (3.00 miles!)
- Velocity: 1,792 fps (1,222MPH, Mach 1.1... really?)
- Acceleration: 44.7 Gees (Raven3 = 54.4, ARTS2 = 35)
- ARTS2 Motor Performance: 7065M3605
The RocSimulation predicted a mere 15,300' AGL so I'm very happy with that altitude. I'm surprised by the velocity of only Mach 1.1 but that must be due to the short 1.8s burn time and 28.3lb liftoff weight. Finally there's quite a difference between the two altimeters on acceleration. The ARTS2 maxes out at 50Gees so I'm inclined to believe the Raven3 with it's 250Gee max.
The December launch at Lucerne was cancelled due to rain. Two months later there remained some photogenic puddles so that's one benefit:
Addendum: David Reese captured a liftoff shot and kindly shared the link to his Flickr site:
It's not quite a 10 foot flame as I originally thought (rocket - 8.5 ft.) but I'll take it! And he caught a proof-of-recovery shot as well:
Thanks for all you do, David!
4 comments:
nice video on franks lift-off its like your camera did that on purpose
I popped out of the Wildman West tent real quick for this... It's a little backfocused, but hey, better than nuttin, right? https://www.flickr.com/photos/daveyfire/16369923338/ :D
Killer flight. Wanna drag race at RS on M3100WTs?
Thanks, David, and yes let's do that! I still have an M3100 that was targeted for the SD Club's 2000MPH President's challenge but I never got around to that. I'll definitely need thermite for RS and I'll still lose the drag race to you because that's how I roll! Just ask Frank Hermes. :) Thanks for throwing down the gauntlet.
Oh wow and thanks for the photos, David! You totally covered me because I was sad to have no liftoff shot but now I do. And you got a walking shot as well. Great photos, dude!
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