BATFE Court Decision

To THEM?!? Of course it's peanuts to them, we're paying for it. No matter how or where we win, we loose in the end.

TK

Forgetting the joking for a moment, I wonder how the Estes Hydrogen Launcher would qualify if they actually start enumerating deflagration

-- that'll look good in court ("your honor, they are using water and electricity to power this dangerous rocket launcher...")

David Erbas-White

So what's a knar?

Surely Beau, you jest.

Knar was the father of Klingon rocketry!

Randy

I would bet that gasoline deflagrates fast enough to meet BATFE standards of today.

Nobody would dare list gasoline as an explosive as it would be political suicide. My vehicle uses diesel which is fairly difficult to burn and certainly doesn't explode.

Brian Elfert

Tripoli is proposing any money from the BATFE be used for self insurance. Liability Insurance is Tripli's primary expense. It was costing $45 per member for insurance, but that may have gone down a bit.

Brian Elfert

bob: but is burn rate the same thing as deflagration burn rate?

also doesn't this mean that since differnet APCP propellant may have differing compositions they had to test all? or wioll they use a generalized test method here/

shockie B)

Seems like a win...

Better yet, does Tim get his job back?

Does this mean I can start building and launching rockets again? I was ready for level 1 cert and all this crap happened. It killed my lust for bigger, faster, farther. There is just no way I could keep going knowing I couldn't build a bigger, better rocket next.

All the hobby stores closed here in the Charlotte area. There is no place to get even F20-7's much less reloads for my casing. Does this mean the hobby stores will come back? Or that vendors can again bring lots of motors to the launches and you can stock up for later once more?

And best of all, does this mean I can finally buy H, I, and J size motors without having to get a LEUP or any of that horrid bullshit that goes with it?

Been a long time, lots or dust and cobwebs on my rockets. That 6 footer that I never got to launch has been mocking me for years. So when can I start to enjoy the sport again?

You mean like the CPSC?

-- David

Actually, in its primary intended use, it very well does explode, dozens of times per second. That explosion is what pushes the piston back up.

I'd be glad to share the roads with your diesel vehicle.

Yes, the burn rates vary depending on the composition. And I'm sure the BATF will try to find the single highest burn rate APCP and try to pass that off as covering all APCP. We must be ready for that.

But we really need to do is to use this court decision to paint the BATF as a bunch of incompetent regulators on the order of Michael Brown and FEMA. make them look so stupid for fighting us over this that the idiots in charge get themselves wiped off the map.

I think we know a senator or 10 and a Wall Street Journal reporter that might help us out here.

Deflagration is just a definiton of a range of burn rates. Most reasonable people consider deflagration as a burn rate greater than 1 meter per seocnd, and an explosion as a burn rate greater than the speed of sound.

All of the APCP formulas used in commerically available rocket motors burn slower than 0.025 meters per second. Even the most aggressive experimental propellant forumulas I've seen burn at less than 0.05 meters per second. Think about it - the web thickness of a nice hefty 54mm J motor is about .015 meters. If that APCP burned at 1 meter per second, the motor would burn in .015 seconds and would be a J80,000. And that's the very bottom end of the deflagration range.

So we're way more than an order of magnitude less than any reasonable definition of deflagration. If they lower the definition of deflagration to the burn rate of APCP in its intended use (ie, a rocket motor with a max pressure of around 2500 PSI), they'd have to include a whole ton of common household items as has already been mentioned in this thread.

-- David

I've been buying H I and J motors for years without needing my LEUP. That wouldn't have changed until and unless the NPRM from several years ago ever got to the rule making stage. This court decision makes that moot.

Long term, it will bring back vendors and folks like you who left the hobby due to the regulation. But it won't happen overnight, and the fight isn't over yet. This decision does put us one "giant leap" closer to our goal.

Most of us never quit.

So, I read the legaleze, and I agree it is a very positive step... but I don't understand the "remand" legal terminology.

Does the ATFE have to come back to the court with their definition of deflagration, and an indication of whether APCP meets that definition or not? Or doe they just have to modify their regs according to the court's statements? Do they have a time limit? Without a time limit, it seems to me that the ATFE could take a couple of years (or longer) to even respond, and that's without the appeal process...

It would have been nice if we had gotten injunctive relief in the meantime.

(not trying to take a pessimistic view, I do agree this is a very very positive step - just trying to figure out what happens next)

no, the exploding quality of gasoline is "knocking" that is undesired. you want a rapid burn but not an explosion.

this is the sort of argument we are trying to get straightened out. APCP doesn't explode, it just burns really really fast.