This tall kit is originally supplied with a single long body tube. Since it was damaged in shipping, I cut out the crushed section and spliced together two smaller tubes by making a long, 10" payload section out of the upper third. These tubes had to be sized exactly as the original, because the supplied full-body wrap decals needed to be used. This kit came with a lot of high quality parts, including a foil-lined motor tube, a parachute swivel, cloth-covered shock cord, matching aqua-colored heavy plastic parachute and of course all those decals. It takes 24mm D and E engines. I added an ejection baffle to this rocket.
| Flight Date: | 2013-08-31 |
| Rocket Name: | DEFCON 1 |
| Kit Name: | Quasar One - DEFCON 1 {Kit} |
| Flyer's Name: | Rich DeAngelis |
| Motors: | D12-7 |
| Launch Site: | Fort Indiantown Gap, PA |
| Actual Altitude: | 649.00 Feet |
I have only flown this model once with a D12 before. This time I will use the 7 second delay since it appeared to need another second or two to maximize the apogee in its last flight. To prevent its possible loss, I swapped out the stock 18 inch 'chute for a bright pink 14 inch 'chute.
As the mighty D12 started burning, it accelerated off the pad much quicker than I anticipated, peaking at 10.8 Gs. The motor burned quickly and for only 1.7 seconds, accelerating at 3.2 Gs on average and reaching a top speed of 118 mph. I lost sight of it as it flew straight up in the light winds.
It coasted during the long 7.5 second delay, then fired the ejection while still travelling upwards. As the parachute deployed in the last 2/10 seconds, it continued up from 531 feet to a 649 feet apogee. (That would be > 400 mph? There seems to be a slight altimeter accuracy error in these numbers - but that is all I have to go on.)
Oddly, even though it had a much longer delay then last time (7.5 vs. 4.8 seconds), it didn't reach as high as before. This seems to happen to me a lot, where a longer delay more often than not produces a LOWER altitude. I can't explain it. I expected much more than 700 feet from this flight.
A fully deployed parachute then brought the rocket back to earth at 12 mph, landing safely about 300 feet away and undamaged.
| Stage | Motor(s) |
|---|---|
| 1 | Estes D12-7 |
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