This is the biggest rocket I've built to date. Okay, the paint is drying on one that's a few inches longer in the garage right now.
Long John Silver measured out at 40 inches, nose to ass. And with his double-hull construction (there's a smaller, BT-50 tube inside that runs to about six inches below the nose cone, reducing the interior volume to ensure the recovery charge blows the nose cone out) it's probably the heaviest I've launched.
His 18 inch parachute, however, did not deploy, and he was coming down fast, nose first. His cone was out, but the tube was still behaving as if it weren't.
Luckily, he didn't hit the ground head first, which would have certainly destroyed the rocket. They uncoil along the sames in their paper tubing when that happens.
Nope, instead, Long John landed in a tree. Too high up for me to get. Too high up for the kids who tried to climb up to get him. He appears to be intact, for what it's worth (very little unless the wind blows him out and I can get to him before someone else does).
Pumpkinflower might actually have measured out a few inches longer than Long John, now that I think of it. Skinnier, especially the bottom fourth or so below the boat-tail.
Pumpkinflower is cobbled together from the wreckage of Sunflower and the Great Pumpkin with a bit of new material as well. Another parachute failure, though, so now the top part of Pumpkinflower is back in the scrap rocket bin waiting for me to build a new tail for it. You can see the unspiraling I talked about. This is what makes model rockets safe: even if it landed on your head, it'll startle you more than it'll injure you because the paper tubing will absorb the impact and be destroyed in the process.
Not that I'd recommend getting knocked in the head with model rockets. But I've had them land on cars, for instance, and not scratch the paint (for which I was immensely grateful). Estes has supposedly flown them into windows without breaking the windows, but I don't think they recommend you try it out yourself.
FrankenGonzo was made with the base of Gonzo III or IV (I forget which was which), with a nose cone made to look like a satellite launch vehicle.
I still have too many parachutes not open. I've tried different schemes of where to tie it on the shock chord, wrapping the packed 'chute in recovery wadding or not, etc. I'm going to try and make the KCAR launch Saturday at Shawnee Mission Park if I'm in good shape on my freelance work. Maybe the veteran rocket nerds can offer me some pointers.
Here's what bad news coming down looks like:
Scribble IV survived this fall, but that was dumb luck.
Here's what it's supposed to look like coming down:
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