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Old 04-03-2019, 09:49 PM
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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 mwtoelle
A piston would help, but only the only people that I know that would use them are competition fliers. If the A10 was actually labelled to reflect the actual average of the motor, it would be an A2 instead. I have actually flown 1974 vintage A10-0Ts, and even those motors had a long burn. I even put a comment in my flight log about to A10-0T burning about as long as an A3 motor. In the Estes catalogs of the time it was claimed that the A10s had a 0.26 sec. thrust duration. Current catalogs show the A10s with a 0.80 sec thrust duration. Personally, I think that the A10 has always had the longer duration listed in the newer catalogs. Even the data from S&T concurs with the longer thrust duration. As I have learned over the years, long burn, low thrust motors and windy flight conditions do not mix very well.
That's too bad--competition flyers don't have any special DNA... :-) The fit of the blow-off tube of a piston launcher does have to be just right, but vented gap-staging (and the Centuri Pass-Port stages) also requires/required just the right fit (so that the lower stage burn-through gases can be vented to relieve the inter-stage pressure, without blowing the two stages apart before the upper one can ignite.
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