Anyone doing anything with Rocket Motors besides fly them?

Just brainstorming but I was wondering if anyone was (for example) Drag Racing or Speed Boating, maybe even the opposite of striving for hight; Deep Water Depth Challenge.

How would someone shoot a 'rocket' straight down into the water and have it 'breath' and not go out? How would you know just how far it got? What would you construct it out of, and for that matter; how to recover it (depth performance vs buoyancy, etc).

Hmmm.

berk

Reply to
TBerk
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It doesn't need to "breathe" as it takes both fuel *and* oxidizer along inside the motor. Besides, if it "breathed" how would oxygen get into the motor with all the exhaust coming out?

Reply to
tempshopper

Hey, hey! _I'll_ be asking the rhetorical questions around here!

But really though, valid points. I sometimes sacrifice a thorough thinking-though during brainstorm sessions.

berk

Reply to
TBerk

I am building a rocket car, a BIG one. I've made little ones by outfitting plastic toy cars with D engine mounts and they've worked pretty well, but my best (straightest) one got up to probably 30 mph and went maybe 100 yards with coasting.

This car is about 6 feet long with 12" wheels, an 8" PVC pipe as a body and a LOC 7.5" nose cone. It'll have a 54mm motor mount in it with a 38mm adaptor for initial runs. I have about 1500' of wire for it to run on. Weigh in is at around 40 lb fully loaded. With an I161 to start, my calculations say it'll get up to about 15 mph and roll

100'. If I stuffed a K700 in it my math works out to well over 200 mph and a hard chute is needed to keep it from running the full length of the wire. We'll see!

Todd

Reply to
Todd

Another potential idea: Underwater launch. I've often thought of taking a PVC tube, loading it with a rocket, sealing it off with seran wrap, mounting it underwater with maybe 2-3" of water over the top, and then launching the rocket submarine ICBM style. I wonder if it would work or the rocket would just crumple trying to get through the water?

Reply to
Todd

I've done this before. Used a tall kitchen-style trashcan and wedged a wood block with a launch rod in the bottom. I don't remember how much we filled it up, I don't think it was over the top of the rod. We launched several rockets by just prepping the engine and taping it in place (this was back in the days when you bent the igniter, pushed it and a small ball of tissue into the engine, then covered it with a piece of tape). Attached the ignition leads, slid the rocket down the rod and fired it before water could soak in. Made a big blast and sprayed water everywhere when the rocket exited the "bucket".

I've also made tube launchers (out of water this time) that used a large diameter (3.75" I think) thin-walled tube and "slippers" between the fins/body and the tube. I call the adapters "slippers" rather than "sabots" (French for wooden shoe) because my adapters run down the length of the rocket rather than just around the circumference. I made a nice semi-scale patriot that I launched this way. One thing I DID learn is that you need a powerful engine to get the rocket out of the tube (at least mine did). I tried launching the patriot on an A and it didn't make it out of the tube.

Reply to
lektric.dan

Wow, that sounds cool. I'm surprised the water didn't ground the igniter leads.

Reply to
Todd

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