Not very 'humane' though. As a kid we put a small frog in the nose of such a rocket. The results was a puree of blood and guts in the nose cone. We know the parachute opened properly and lowered the rocket slowly to earth as the rest of the rocket was quite intact (an unopened parachute would always result in a grounded rocket until we could repair the damage). We came to the conclusion that those little rockets have a *considerable* acceleration at lift-off :-)
daestrom
They do. But it could have been the small charge that blows the nose cone that squished your frog.
Well that may be. I looked up the Estes rocket engines and the peak thrust for a B6 series engine is about 12 N. Given a rocket of about 40 g and a frog of about the same weight, that means a peak acceleration of 150 m/s or about 15 g's.
Don't know if that would break most of the bones in a frog crammed into a payload capsule or not. (we didn't create any sort of 'acceleration couch' for the little guy) But as I said before (and obviously Archimedes can't read), I know the landing was relatively mild since all the balsa wood fins were still intact. We had to repair enough of those that we were always relieved to see the parachute open :-)
So your idea about the parachute ejection charge might be right. I couldn't find any data regarding the magnitude of this charge but I remember it does 'pop' the nose cone pretty good. That's why the shock cord I reckon.
daestrom
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