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.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Fog and Long Camera Boom

We're continuing to catch up on the launch reports from the last couple of months.

On June 14th when we arrived at the launch site there was still some fog so we quickly launched a rocket to see if we could get above it.


We also flew a long boom on the rocket to see if we could get a shot of the entire rocket side on.

Here is a highlights video from the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQSiEX9Kyf4



The full flight day report is available here: http://www.aircommandrockets.com/day161.htm

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Looking At Measurement Errors

We've been quite busy over the last 3 months, though we have had time to build and launch rockets, just not write about them. I am now finally catching up on the launch reports.

Here is the first one from back in March. We looked at the variability in measurements, as its important to understand their magnitude when doing various performance comparisons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vz0Xb_Me5E


The full report is available here: http://www.aircommandrockets.com/day159.htm

Monday, April 06, 2015

Dark Shadow flies to 1752 feet (534m)

Dark Shadow is our latest water rocket project. Construction on this project began in June last year, and we had a chance to fly it 3 times at the recent Thunda Down Under event in Westmar QLD.
The rocket was designed to try to set a new personal best altitude record. We progressively increased the pressure on subsequent flights to finally achieve an altitude of 1752' or 534m.
Here is a highlights video of the 3 flights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r9gmLfpFTg

 The full flight report is here:
http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/day158.htm

I have also uploaded the build log that has full details about the rocket's construction here:
http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/dark_shadow_1.htm






Thursday, March 26, 2015

Polaron G2 - Phase 2 Flights

Fast forwarding a few months ....

Two weeks ago we had the opportunity to fly our full size Polaron G2 rocket with boosters at Australian Rocketry's Thunda Down Under international launch event in Westmar QLD.

We were glad to finally get this rocket in the air after several years of development. It didn't take several years to build, we just procrastinate a lot.

We flew the rocket successfully a couple of times, and are looking to now move on to Phase 3, - adding a 2nd stage to the main stage. We are likely to fly this rocket again in the current configuration though in calmer conditions as the two recent flights were affected by strong wind and didn't go as vertically as we would have liked. There may have also been a small stability issue close to booster burn out due to the large amount of water still in the bottom of the main stage that used a very small nozzle. This rocket had been designed for a long burn rather than altitude. It had a predicted burn time of around 10 seconds. We didn't quite achieve that but at ~8 seconds it was still fun to watch.

 

We've posted a video of the flights here:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnripxx0TeU


And the full G2 launch report with photos (day 157) is available here:
http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/day157.htm