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.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been putting together a series of challenges that people can attempt with their water rockets. These challenges are designed much the same way one would collect scout badges when they have achieved certain activities. Each challenge is also designed to address a different aspect of the sport.
For each challenge you achieve you are awarded a patch that you can place on your website, blog or video. There are no judges or approval processes, and patches are purely self-awarded on an honor system when you believe you have achieved the challenge in the spirit it was intended.
You should also be able to attempt all the challenges at your local park, but be warned these challenges are difficult!
Are you up for a challenge? …. Read More....
8 comments:
Hey George,
I love the idea i think its great and i shall have to attempt gaining a few :)
Regards Doug
Thanks Doug, good to hear you'll give it a go. :) I'm interested in seeing what approaches people will take with their challenges. Do you know which challenge you'd like to try first?
Personally I'd like to try the Materials challenge as I have no idea how to make a stable rocket out of PET only. :)
Hey George,
I was also thinking of the materials challenge, it sounds one of hardest to do. Having said that i would like to give the recovery challenge a good go as all the systems i have made have failed after launch even after extensive ground testing.
I'll keep it posted whichever i pursue :)
Regards Doug
Hey George
im loving the idea of the challenges i hopefully can aquire a few im liking the idea of launching different weights and capacitys ive been thinking of a large capacity V2 for a while maybe this will be the ideal time to start. George could you explain some rules for the multi stage rockets when you say a 4 stage does that mean you would use eg 4 katz stagers = 4 rockets?
kind regards Dan B
Hi Dan,
I'd love to see a large volume V2 go up! :)
I would see a 4-stage rocket as having 3 staging devices what ever they may be. The same way a 2-stage rocket has 1 staging device. The idea was that each successive stage would have to fire after the previous one rather than all simultaneously or in parallel. Boosters aren't technically a separate stage if they fire at the same time as the stage they are attached to, but heck if someone builds a 4 stage rocket with boosters that fall away, I'd say that's close enough to a 5 stage rocket. :)
I wanted to put the least number of constraints on the challenge goal to allow people to interpret the challenge in their own way.
It might be interesting to see a booster release 4 individual rockets simultaneously. :)
Have to get back into water rocketry...
Great idea, these challenges. On other water rocket sites it seems that people just aim for ever greater altitudes. Your challenges make it all more interesting. Maybe you should add a minimum altitude to No 3 -- precision. I am also wondering how to verify the altitude in No 10. Maybe it should be allowed to use non-PET payloads (altimeter) or to use paint to make the rocket more visible.
Anonymous: A couple of good points about knowing how high the all PET rocket goes. I guess one will need to get creative with measuring the altitude. :) Hopefully the rocket should still be visible even though it's clear. Coloured PET plastic is allowed though.
And yes you are right challenge #3 has no minimum altitude. I should add that 50' is a minimum.
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