I busted out my robust but rarely flown Vertical Assault from Giant Leap Rocketry and the flight sim'd to 14,000' AGL. While I left my DSLR at home and my onboard keychain camera failed inexplicably just after starting it I did get some solid Beeline GPS data for Plotting in Google Earth:
I'm hoping that David Reese might have grabbed a liftoff photo that I can cross-post to this blog. :) [Update: David is my hero!]
The liftoff was relatively quick but the rocket exhibited coning at about 1000'. This makes sense since the Vertical Assault is overstable, even with a Pro54 6GXL motor, and was at a 2.8 static margin at liftoff. After the coning ceased the flight quickly sprinted out of site so I'm grateful I had GPS running. It's been awhile and I managed to forget that GPS reports via APRS to my radio report MSL (Mean Sea Level) numbers so I was a bit befuddled when the altitude reports stabilized at 3,079' high and 1.3 miles due north. In following the heading North I eventually saw an orange parachute briefly blow up above the heat convection ocean as if the rocket were saying "Howdy! I'm here!" Yet another 1+ mile jaunt found the rocket in solid condition:
There were some scrapes on the maroon-ish car paint but I'll wipe most of those off. The Raven2 (tabular, graph) reported maxima of 13,814' AGL, 799 MPH, and 38 Gees (that acceleration seems way too high). The GPS maxed out at 14,160' AGL so the average was 13,987' and that's pretty damned close to RockSim/OpenRocket's simulations! Since the Vertical Assault is mostly set up I think I'll fly a CTI 2772L640 Dual Thrust at Lucerne in May. Yay.
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