This blog covers the day to day progress of water rocket development by the Air Command Water Rockets team. It is also a facility for people to provide feedback and ask questions.

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Polaron G2

Okay time to get a little more serious with these water rockets. We haven't really been optimizing a lot of our rockets as we carried out various experiments. But it's time to start pushing the envelope a little more with the next set of rockets. These will focus on optimizing the rocket as a whole for better performance using the lessons we have learned.

Polaron G2 is a new rocket now in the planning stages, and we are starting to gather materials for it.


Here are a few 2L bottles ready for processing into rocket components. We will also be trying out some new construction techniques. Polaron G2 will follow the Polaron series of rockets in overall design, and will be developed in 3 phases. The first phase will be a full size single stage rocket, with drop away boosters in phase two, and with phase 3 a small sustainer will be added to the main stage.

Time allowing I will try to keep this blog updated with more regular progress, with major milestones covered on our main website. We are revisiting each aspect of the rocket and seeing how things can be improved. The rocket will also need an upgraded launcher with a longer guide rail.

Currently the target launch pressure is at 250psi, but things may change depending on how various tests go with the design.

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2 comments:

rstaff said...

Soooo you've just been semi-serious up until now? Reeeeaaaaly? Clustered, staged, custom electronics, video, excellent documentation. Sounds serious to me!

(But everything can be improved, I reckon.)

George Katz said...

Thanks Dick :) It's been a fun ride so far, but we have been cutting corners on things like aerodynamics and weight reduction. I think we can improve in those areas. With higher pressures, these factors are going to start playing a larger role. Perhaps we might even finally paint our rockets :)

I'll save the "really really serious" work for after we build a launch bunker. :)