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Old 01-27-2011, 01:05 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Beowulf
After our flight on Saturday , I am very interested in building a launch pad that allows for more accurate targeting than our basic Estes one. I have an old german equatorial mount, to which I am thinking about attaching a platform. The idea is that I could adjust the tripod to level the pad, and then set the launch angle and direction using the mount.

What I'd really like to be able to do is to enter the current environmental conditions into an application and then use the calculated rod deflection and direction in order to return the rocket close to the launch pad. Heck, if I could make it land back on the rod, then I would!

My question is this: has this type of project been done before? I don't see a similar thread having been posted previously, which leads me to suspect if such a thread exists, that it has been archived. Either that, or the idea itself is folly. What do you all think? Thanks for your feedback!
This could be the seed of a fascinating NAR Research & Development contest category entry. You could use the same "wind-weighting" equations that are used to aim the launchers of full-scale unguided sounding rockets so that the rockets will land in desired impact areas. As the folks at Wallops Island, White Sands, Woomera, and other ranges do, you could collect pre-launch wind data from a ground-based portable anemometer and acquire "winds aloft" data by tracking the motions of released helium balloons. (The "big boys" sometimes botch their "wind-weighting"--the second British Skylark sounding rocket veered far away from its assigned impact zone on the Woomera Range in Australia because the launch crew accidentally skipped one of the equations that they used to compute the rockets' trajectories based on the winds aloft!)
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