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Originally Posted by olDave
But then it was sold, and the moderation/control became rather strange.
And when Shrox was banned, that was kinda all it took for me. I have pretty much quit TRF.
Over the years, I have noticed that there are lots of high-power enthusiasts over there. High power stuff is fine, it's just not my cup of tea. I do take exception to all the over-building that gets highlighted and bragged on with many of those high-power rockets. Seems like that portion of the hobby has been largely taken over by the "hold my beer and WATCH THIS!!" crowd. And no, not all of them fall in that category, but many do.
One of the most important features of our hobby at the beginning of it all was the safety theme of safe design and construction. Rockets were supposed to be crushable in case they struck anyone or anything important. Rockets were deliberately supposed to suffer the damage. The over-building gonzo crowd seemed to be proud that their rocket fell from X-thousand feet (after a recovery deployment failure) without any damage. That is just not right.
It didn't take a rocket scientist to foresee the day when those monster-sized (heavy), over-built, high powered rockets would start coming down on cars. And houses. And people. "The heck with safety, I wanna try a motor with the next bigger letter, and just because I can afford it, it must be a good idea!"
I don't like that attitude. But I am not gonna joust windmills over there on TRF and try to educate the apes that can't understand and don't want to learn.
Myself, I got burned out on trying to explain that swiveling fins on the front of the rocket needed to have static and dynamic stability all by themselves, or a severe case of aero-induced oscillatory flutter would likely ensue. This is pretty well understood throughout the aerospace industry....but I was stuck trying to explain this stuff to a bunch of JoeBobs. The capper for me was when one of those guys pulled out an old SAWE (Society of Allied Weight Engineers, of which I used to be a member) technical report to "prove" his point that the fin C.G. could be anywhere and that the moveable fin would still be safe, when the report that he was citing said the exact opposite. Oh well, you can lead a horse to water....
TRF had just become too misdirected for my tastes. I did regret leaving behind many contacts with some of the really great folks over there.
olDave (a.k.a., powderburner)
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Yes, EXACTLY!! I feel EXACTLY the same way!
TRF was always overmoderated, but it "was what it was"... but then when it was "sold out" for a quick buck to a lousy bunch of "web developers" instead of keeping it in the hands of rocketry people (ie people who actually cared about rocketry) and instead flipped it to a bunch of speculators looking to turn it into a cash cow, who turned it over to the moderators who went "ban happy" and either on the owner's orders or with their consent started running off the vendors... and when they got WAY too happy issuing slapdowns for anything that any of small group of perpetual whiners made a stink about, I had enough.
I'd always been disappointed with the noise/signal ratio over there-- far too many idiotic things like "word association games" and other nonsense strictly for the purpose of padding certain one's post counts. TRF had a lot of people, but that doesn't equate to quality... a lot of newbs coming in starting new versions of the same five-n-dime glue threads and paint threads, etc... and often times contributing to the noise with a lot of weird, nonsensical, off-topic, irrelevant, or just plain WRONG stuff... It all added up and wore me out, and finally one day about 2.5 years ago, I just said, "F--- it" and left and haven't really been back, and don't intend to. I've followed links over there when YORFers posted something of interest or chatting about the latest kerfluffle over there... but otherwise, NOPE... haven't lost a thing over there. One of the BIG 'final straws' over there waas when the new owners summarily stated that basically ANYTHING posted on that forum, by virtue of being posted on THEIR forum, essentially became THEIR property, that posting on the forum was "implied consent" that "gave" ownership and all rights to them. That drove away all the creative stuff and most of the vendors in and of itself... and their war on vendors by jumping on them for ANYTHING, even answering questions about their products or posting "coming soon" type information, in an effort to extort more 'paid advertising" from them when they weren't doing what they had already been paid to do by some vendors ANYWAY... That was certainly enough for me.
You're also "spot on" about the HPR crowd. I've been to a number of HPR launches in Texas and safety is VERY lax compared to most model rocket activities, when exactly the OPPOSITE should be true. It seems like it's the DUMBEST things that end up biting people in the butt, as well, or outright breaking of the rules. One launch I attended, I was standing in front a card table where some guys I knew were assembling reloads, when suddenly a guy at the next table, who was setting up his altimeters for dual deploy, caught wind gust and set off his altimeters, blowing the charges and sending a 5 inch nosecone about a foot and a half long and VERY sharp, hurtling RIGHT BEHIND the guys I was standing in front of... with a wadded bedsheet-size parachute behind it... if it had hit them in the side of the head, it would have killed someone. WHY they 1) had their table set up pointing essentially a loaded gun down the row of tents and 2) had LIVE CHARGES hooked up DIRECTLY the altimeter that was being worked on in the prep area (and NOT equipped with pull pins or safety disconnects of any kind, or the charges installed LAST right before going to the pad) is beyond me. The guy got branded by his own rocket-- the recoil slammed the recovery section av-bay into his gut and left a perfect "ghostbusters" symbol on his abdomen and knocked the wind out of him, sending him to the RV to rest a bit and get his wind back... But then again, WHY were idiots on four wheelers allowed to ride out IN FRONT OF THE PADS when a 2 stage HPR rocket was being LAID OVER HORIZONTALLY POINTED TOWARDS THEM with live staging ignitors and electronics, AGAIN WITH NO SAFETY PULL PINS OR SHORTING BARS OR DISCONNECTS, and allowed to ride right up in front of the horizontal rocket, which subsequently ignited the second stage and flew between the guy on the four wheeler and his girlfriend, which would have killed either had it hit the directly, but as it was caused severe burns on both... I could cite MANY more such situations... like the one that ended a decades-old use of a flying field after the club, despite preexisting rules banning "sparky motors", allowed some numb-nut kids participating in a NASA launch challenge program to fly on a sparky motor ANYWAY, despite having previously told them NOT TO, which caused a fire that burned off about 40 acres of rangeland and came very near to burning off a couple hundred acres of dry standing wheat ready to be harvested... Not ALL HPR flyers are that way, but from what I've seen, FAR, FAR TOO MANY ARE! That's why we don't allow ANY HPR flying on our farms... and again, a big part of that is the "anti-tank round construction" that seems all the rage... heck when even the NAR magazine is running articles on how to turn your Estes kit into a fiberglassed "anti-tank round" capable of falling from a bazillion feet and not suffer any damage, something is SERIOUSLY wrong with the safety culture. It's unnecessary and unsafe, and I don't want it around my home and family (we live on the farm where the club launches). It's bad enough when you get yahoos that overbuild 2-3 foot tall 2 inch diameter rockets that weigh about a pound... having a 4-10 foot tall rocket 4-8 inches in diameter built like an antitank round that weighs dozens of pounds-- the danger is at a whole other level, and we're not having any of it... I've had a lot of pressure from HPR guys about that-- the same guys that will drop a grand on a single flight of their latest carbon fiber monster on the 'next letter up" motor, balk and whine like babies about having to drive 3 hours to the nearest HPR field and burn $30 bucks in gas for the day... I never have understood that either...
Oh well... I've given up trying to make sense out of most of the HPR crowd's thinking...
It's been my personal experience that most of those guys are swaggering apes who just want to show off how big their wallets are, more than anything. They tout how much they "have to know" and their certs, like that makes them something special (every drunk driver had a driver's license at some point, so what does the license prove?) While they "have to know so much" they don't seem to apply it to anything more than "let's shove a bigger motor in there and see what happens" type stuff... and of course bragging to anybody who'll listen about how much it all costs... and if like me you are TOTALLY UNIMPRESSED by it, they get fighting mad! HOW DARE YOU not fawn all over them because of how much money they've blown and how big and powerful their rocket motor they bought was! LOL
I don't have time for that garbage, and I don't like hanging around with that type...
Later! OL J R