Entertaining the ROCI guys
 

When I was still playing ball, our team walked into a dugout one night only to be assaulted by the smell of recent vomit. We were playing with a patchwork team that night and our scorekeeper made a notation in the scorebook. "It smells like vomit, and will only get worse."
That pretty much sums up my visit to Muncie today. :rolleyes:
It just started out bad. I picked the Rascal upscale to start things off.



With a freshly opened E9-4, I was expecting the usual long, graceful flight. Well, the graceful part lasted long enough for it to get out of camera range, so there are no pics of all hell breaking loose.







Short of a lawn dart, I've never had a more totally destroyed rocket. The whole motor tube is gone. Three of the four fins were damaged. There's a hole the size of a midget's fist in the body tube.
But, hey. The nose cone survived with just a smudge. Probably from being hit by a piece of balsa shrapnel.

This is what remained when I got home.

That's awful. So, what do you think happened?

Second flight was also on an E9-4 from the same pack. (Back on the horse that bit you, eh?) The Zepher 7.95, another first flight bird, (and this time I remembered to take the on pad glamour shot. :o )



No drama this time. Perfect flight and recovery.





With my Mojo back, I figured it would be a good time to try the Estes Explorer Aquarius. Fresh pack of D12-3s bought just for this occasion. :cool: It was a real pain to build, but it came out way nicer than I'd hoped. The decals were the easiest part of the build, contrary to what I'd read previously.




Windcocked off the pad, but so did everything else today. Chute popped just as it nosed over. The flight was surprisingly high for what I consider a fairly piggish bird.



Recovery was kind of a butt-tightening experience as it looked to be headed to the asphalt, but eventually cleared it nicely. A soft, if slightly muddy landing. :cool:

With my Mojo back with a vengeance, (forgive me if I botched that spelling, but I'm too tired to look it up,) I got out my 1:1 FSI Dart clone. I loved how this one turned out. :cool:



I had an E9-8 with its name on it, hoping to get something of an idea what it was like in the good ol' days of FSI. Well, I got more than I bargained for. :eek:



This one only made it about a foot before it detonated.



The motor fired out, hit the blast deflector, and blew the whole rod out of the pad. The rocket kept going up, probably to about the 100' point, then lawn darted just to our right.



The good news is that I can reuse the nose cone and recovery system. The bad news is that the rest of it looks like the T-1000 after Ahnold feeds it a snack from the grenade launcher. :(

That explosion looks EXACTLY like the good ol' days of FSI!

Okay, so now I'm seriously shaken. But the next flight is going to be #1000. Nothing can go wrong with that, right? Yeah, well enjoy this shot. Even with me in it, the Ventris will never look better. :mad:



The only F motor Hobby Lobby had when I bought them for this flight was the F50-6T. I figured it was an Estes motor in an Estes bird. What could possibly go wrong?



I swear that I got the launch shot, but I can't find it. It left hard and fast and was still travelling at a high rate of speed when the ejection charge fired. The F50-6T turned out to be a F50-2T at best. Body tube and payload section separated with the body tube free falling and the payload section drifting off for parts unknown.



Then, as if to make it more special, the body tube landed on the asphalt. Repairs are going to be tough unless that payload section shows up. Two fins were damaged, with one dislocated completely. The break was clean along the fillets and could possibly be made flightworthy again, but I'm not terribly optimistic.

My old friend CATO came to visit. ;)

Yeah, I wasn't in a funny mood, but I had to admit that there were two ways it could replicate an actual FSI flight. I just got the wrong one. There was a certain rueful humor to the whole thing. :rolleyes:

Almost fateful. Fabulous picture of the event, by the way! I see a rather large package headed your way from Penrose.

The E-8 was pretty old, so I'm going to say I stored them wrong at some point. The E9-4 and F50-6 were newly purchased. They'll definitely hear about them.
As for the pic, I need to keep my finger on the button and keep the burst going. I stopped when I heard the explosion both times. I was just lucky that the Dart fireballed almost instantly.
Heh, lucky. Yeah, that's me. :(