05-19-2009, 07:43 PM
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BARCLONE Rocketry
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Mobile, Alabama
Posts: 5,357
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Bill,
What I'll add here first is an observation. As you work with RockSim more and more, you will slowly get a feel for what works and what doesn't. As you watch the Dv numbers on your designs get better, you'll start noticing proportions, or ratios of how much of this works with how long of that, and your designs will begin reflecting it.
It never gets 'easy', in the sense that you'll never reach a point where you never get one wrong; but it will get 'easier', in that you'll have more designs that fall into the ranges you want them to than designs that don't.
As for advice, the only thing I can offer of value is "Practice, practice, practice". You have to come up with something each day, like a writer has to write a few pages each day, to understand this process. Even if the design you create is pure garbage, you still have to 'get it out of your system' in order to move on to something that works. Trust me on that one -- I've got reams of designs that will never fly because the proportions are totally whacked, but I had to put them into a RKT file just to be able to set them aside.
Some may think I'm kidding about my challenges to the BARCLONE core team, trying to get them into designing at least one model each day, but I'm not. It's a tough challenge at times, and I don't always follow my own counsel. But when I get 'on a roll' with designing, it really seems to flow more freely when I'm consistent with the process. And the good designs wil far outnumber the bad ones.
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