“We had a bad day”. This pretty much sums up our launch day at LRE 2017. First LD’s CHIRON 3 rocket overpressurized in a spectacular way, taking out the upper 2/3rd of the launch rail. A makeshift launch rail was made and the GIGA was launched from the remaining 2,5m lower section. The GIGA rocket suffered the
The nose cone avionics arrangement went through quite a few iterations as it was more or less designed around the 4000mAh battery. However it proved to be quite a challenge mounting the battery on the centerline of the rocket / nose cone and still being able to fit the other components. Although the 86mm 5:1
The GIGA rocket has been designed as a true minimum diameter rocket with fin brackets mounted directly onto the casing. This is not a particular KISS approach but rather a result from the “sustainer ready” requirement. Alternatives considered were: Welded aluminium fincan. However due to the lack of availability of matching off-the-shelf materials (it is
She’s finished and with the LRE launch confirmed for 29-30 April 2017, we are go for launch. There is some backlog on the construction updates but these will come shortly.
After some struggles with the high L/D ratio EDPM liner I managed to find an approach which worked well both inserting the liner into the casing as wells as inserting the grains into the liner. Below sequence seemed to work best: Talc both the casing and liner (in & out), remove excess talc. Insert both Full
GIGA recovery hardware consisting of: 5m – 3/8″ tubular kevlar Kevlar burito secured to the shock cord at 1m 60″ Iris Fruity Chute incl swivel. ” order_by=”filename” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]
Boring post but to be used as personal reference Liner dimensions:1629 x 300mm. Width of liner: In general the liner is constructed with a 20% overlap. Hence: pi x ID of the casing x 1,2 = 301mm = approximate 300mm wide. Length of liner: Depending on chamber length but chamber length usually is grain stack
Ground testing of the deployment charges of the 86mm minimum diameter GIGA rocket. “Test what you fly, fly what you test”.
A 3D printer camera shroud for the Mobius Mini was ordered from Additive Aerospace. However upon closer inspection I noticed the design could be optimized a bit for the GIGA rocket being: The Additive Aerospace camera shroud used four screws positioned in a square to secure the shroud to the airframe. This is particularly hard to
Pull pin Consisting of two-piece pin where as one part can remain in the rocket during preparations and a second part containing the “remove before flight” tag can be screwed on/off during assembly. With the Intimidator 5 we noticed that a protruding pull pin, especially in combination with parts / coupler pieces which need to slide into each other,