I finally got around to viewing the drop test video, and noted the roll axis twist the vehice took on at rebound. It appears that the wire rope bundles deflect sideways a bit when they are compressed, and arranged in a circle like that they induce a torque. Perhaps if you turn them 90 degrees they would simply do a radial scrub, with no torque... I doubt if you can get wire ropes with the opposite handed twist and use two of each to cancel, though.
At rest, the isolators have balanced windings, and they can absorb a fair amount of impact either way, but they can go "over center" under a hard shot and get all the coils leaning the same way.
As for the preheat bang, I wonder if a small orifice solenoid could be used for a tiny trickle flow... but that might exhibit bad channeling and not preheat the entire bed well. I dunno.
Doug
We have a solenoid in parallel with our main valve for preheating, but we found that it preheats a lot better by just putting in a big slug of propellant from the main valve, instead of trickling in with a small solenoid. On the vehicle, we will probably have a computer controlled warmup cycle that makes sure we get reasonably measured slugs of propellant in. The bangs aren't really harmful, just startling...
John Carmack
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