Max Q LDRS 34 edited
This is my 4" Rocketry Warehouse Broken Arrow XP flying at LDRS 34 in Potter, NY on June 26th, 2015. The launch from pad RA4 was a total surprise, the LCO was confused and hit the wrong button. Fortunately, I was listening intently to the commentary and was prepared. I managed to grab my binoculars and did see the apogee event, a critical phase of flight for me following the terrible demise of "Back in Black" a couple of years ago. This was the first full-L impulse flight (CTI L2375-WT) for both me and this airframe, which had flown a shakedown on a J-impulse motor at one of the MDRA local events last year. The dual Raven altimeters appear to disagree significantly on the details of this flight, perhaps owing to the fact that I did not recalibrate them before launch - as evidenced by the average pre-launch axial-g being 0.95 and 1.02. One showed 48g of peak acceleration through 1946 ft-sec to an apogee of 11,884 ft; while the other showed 39g through 1561 ft-sec to 11925 ft. In either case, the data suggests peak velocity to be at least Mach 1.5 at right around 2 seconds into the flight and at about 1600 ft. I do not yet understand what caused the recovery section to begin violently rotating about the long axis during descent, but it made the remainder of the video useless to watch - so I deleted it from this file. After watching that portion of the video carefully, I think the cause is in the fincan. It appeared to be spinning rapidly and twisting the shock cord up. Once it got to a certain point of torsion, the recovery bay began to rotate rapidly also. Must remember to add swivels to the shock cord ends. Also, since the rocket sat on the pad for so long waiting for a waiver, the video camera reached the 3GB cutoff before the main chute deployed - so I don't have that in the recording either. One other detail of note - there was no shroud on the forward recovery bay in front of the camera. Shortly after launch, you can see the airframe and fin appear to move downward in the field of view and then slowly move back up again. I believe this is caused by flexure of the camera mount as the drag increases. Must add a shroud so that I don't lose the camera.

 Rocketry Product: Featherweight Altimeters - Raven {Component}

 Rocketry Club: Maryland Delaware Rocketry Association

Author James Moran
Duration 88 seconds

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