Earlier today (Sunday, Nov 10) we flew KISS 3 twice and KISS Beta once. If experience is what you get when you don't get what you want, then we got a lot of experience.
For the first flight we flew KISS 3 on 4 liters of propellant, at MECO the altimeter got confused and popped the recovery system. We are still not sure what caused this. The chute was ripped up pretty bad, but still slowed the vehicle down enough to recover with very minimal damage. The second flight was a KISS-Beta flight with a solid motor built by Jerry Irvine. The motor was an excellent performer but the Beta booster fins weren't up to the task. A split second before MECO the fins seperated from the body. According to earlier simulations, the expected velocity at that point was pushing into the transonic range (Mach 0.8+). We suspected that there could be fin problems, but thought that they would hold up until Mach 0.9 or so. We were wrong. Mach 0.8 was the fin shred point for those fins. On the third flight we flew KISS 3 with a 5 liter load of propellant. The original plan was to fly with a 7 liter load, but since the velocities were expected to be similar to the KISS-Beta flight, and both boosters had similar fin designs, we cut back the load and thus peak velocity. Also, we went on timer instead of altimeter for recovery deployment this time. Chute deployed apropriately, but the vehicle was travelling fairly fast (large horizontal component due to winds). The chute did not fully open (and/or was ripped) and a fin was slightly damaged on landing. On both KISS 3 flights we had terrible engine chug. We need to try duplicating this in static tests, and find the solution before we move on to other engines. We cannot have this problem on Spike or POGO. Dave _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
