I've been going through some serious Ammonium Perchlorate withdrawals since my last high power launch in April. Unfortunately I couldn't fly during the opening weekend launch for Tripoli San Diego last week due to wind gusts in excess of 22 mph. I had bought an L3200 Vmax from What's Up Hobbies and needed to burn it so I drove up to Lucerne Dry Lake with my sons for ROCtober. It was probably the most mentally and physically exhausting launches I've ever had, but it was totally worth it! It's a three hour drive from Imperial Beach to Lucerne and it took about 5 hours to unpack the car, set up my work area, build the motor and prep the rocket all while keeping my kids out of trouble. During my preflight I discovered that one of the mini-clamps attached to the Raven2 drogue leads had broken and I no longer had continuity to the drogue ejection charge. I didn't have any spare clamps with me, so I had to drill a small hole through the bulkhead to bypass the terminal block and reroute the electric match directly into the Raven2. Crisis averted!
During the off-season I came up with the idea to create a video of the flight by overlaying all the telemetry data received from the Telemetrum. To ensure I captured all the major events (lift-off, drogue, main, and landing), I attached three keychain cameras to the rocket. I also setup a Flip video camera at the launch pad and had my hand held video camera on the flight line. The last step was to screen record the telemetry video/audio coming into my laptop from the TeleMetrum. The end result was my best video yet!
Flight Stats:
TeleMetrum
Raven 2
Altitude
3981 ft
4044 ft
Top Speed
402 mph
406 mph
Top Accel
21 g's
23 g's
With six cameras rolling, I captured a ton of good screen shots. Here are just a few...
Pre flight
Post flight
Ignition!
Lift off on the Cesaroni L3200 Vmax
From 0 to 402 mph in 1.3 seconds!
Lucerne Dry Lake from 3981 feet.
Kickin' out the laundry (drogue)
Fin can descending under the drogue
Upper payload and nose cone prior to main deployment
Main parachute deployment - Rocketman 12'
Google maps summary from TeleMetrum
Red bullseye = launched / Black = landed
