How time flies!
This post isn’t going to reveal anything new and exciting, sorry. It’s just a quick update for a long-overdue visit to this blog. The rocketry bug is starting to crawl around under my skin, and I’m possibly going to get back into the studio for some ‘refresher’ work with the available software. Need to dig out my copies of RockSim and OpenRocket, and attempt to get familiar with them again.
More to come…
It’s the very end of December, 2017, as I write this, and a lot has happened since the last post. The model rocketry community mourned the loss of SEMROC’s head honcho, Carl McLawhorn, to a massive heart attack just a few short years after the luncheon in Dallas. His passing took a lot more of the wind out of my sails in wanting to get active again in the hobby. Within a year of that event, SEMROC the company was sold to eRockets. I do think it’s in good hands, all things considered, but it’s just not the same without Carl.
The space community has had it’s own share of losses, too. We lost Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan, and a few other Apollo-era veterans since the Apollo 7 anniversary. Just a few days ago as I write this, we lost Bruce McCandless. For those who might not remember, he was the CAPCOM for Apollo 11, and later was the iconic ‘human spaceship’ when he took the MMU out of the shuttle bay in February of 1984 for a non-tethered EVA stroll.
In my own life, a change of residence about two years ago has put still more of a squash on getting back into rocketry. The new place is smaller, and much of my building stuff is still where I parked it during the move — in boxes, stacked, where I cannot get to them easily. Even if I could, there’s no place to work on them or display them safely. Sigh…
Again from the ‘big space’ community, SpaceX finally achieved their goals of first landing a booster safely on a barge at sea, then on dry land back at the Cape. Now, they’ve re-flown a few of those boosters, proving the concept of reusability is not a myth. They’ve also re-flown a couple of Dragon capsules to the ISS. Coming up soon will be the first flight of the Falcon Heavy, using two previously-flown boosters for the strap-ons. Heard what the payload is going to be? Elon’s personal cherry red Tesla sportster. Yes, seriously. They’ve posted pictures of the car inside the massive fairing on a mount. Elon says it will be playing ‘Space Oddity’ during the long flight ahead. Destination? Mars orbit. A red car for the red planet. Gotta love the mind of Elon.
Where do I go from here? Don’t know. Maybe one day the bug will bite me again. Not any time soon, however.
I’ve been out of active rocketry for over two years, doing other projects and dealing with life in general. The special project I was involved with back in 2008, building one of the Sat1B table centerpiece models for the luncheon in Dallas commemorating the 40th anniversary of Apollo 7, took a toll on my interest in building rockets. It was a rough eight weeks of details and painting, and I still haven’t developed a desire to get back in the swing of things yet. Currently, I’m doing more with RC airplanes, getting really into antique designs from the late ’20s through the end of the ’60s. I have three models in various stages of progress — A Cyril Shaw “Envoy”, a Vic Smeed “Mams’elle”, and a Keil Kraft “Falcon” — all being built from plans. Good therapy.
I’ve now added BRL-CAD to my list of software packages to learn…
Is there a method to this madness, or just madness in my method? Does anyone smell a pattern brewing? Or is that just a pot of hot caffeine?
Well, it’s still a slow time in the studio here in July. Nothing design-wise has been generated since the last entry, and I’m sure you’re tapping your feet waiting for new content. The coffee pot is being cleaned out of all the crud in the lines…
As mentioned in the previous post, I had two Windows machines remaining, while the others were running Ubuntu. I can now let you know one of those machines – the Win7 box – is now a fully-qualified Ubuntu 11.04 system; meaning I now have four out of five computers running a seriously fast OS. One of the two laptops (a dual-core AMD Turion) runs the x64 flavor, and I am suitably impressed.
The effort to learn Qt is progressing. I’m not totally comfortable with it yet, but it is much easier than it was a couple of months ago…
It’s been very quiet here in the design studio. Not completely dead, there’s always something happening; just not very much in the way of model design or building. Le Grande Fromage has instead been working on his Linux skills, installing Ubuntu on any machine he can find that isn’t already doing something important with Windows. There is one machine in the studio that runs Adobe Photoshop Elements and Corel Draw 12, a Windows Vista box that is operated remotely over the in-house network from a Windows 7 box. At present, this is the only reason (excuse?) for keeping Windows on either of these two machines.
What is brewing in the coffee pot is an effort to learn the Qt environment, and the tools available for creating software with it, namely Designer (for the GUI), and Creator (for the code). Qt is the library-du-jour for RockSim, so getting a better understanding of how it ticks is good practice.
The last build in the studio was the Night SHADOW design, and all it needs is glider trimming and finishing. There hasn’t been time to conduct flight tests yet, not that the weather has cooperated much. It’s been extremely dry and hot on the Gulf Coast this year. We are officially over 12″ below normal rainfall at this point. Not even a passing thunder-boomer has brought enough rain to amount to much. That leaves the flying field dangerously crisp and crunchy, and it’s not worth the risk to go out and attempt a launch yet. A couple of good, drenching rain days are a must.
“You might be a redneck if… you cut your grass and find a car lot…”
The grass around BARCLONE has been getting a bit high, and it was time to get whacking before it took over completely. The exercise located nearly 50 designs that had slipped from sight. Our new list has 882 entries, of which 25 do not have their links fully qualified. New RockSim files will be generated for these designs and then connected into the list.
Click here to download: BARCLONE 2011 Catalog
I am beginning to generate Corel Draw 10 burn patterns for balsa and matteboard fin sheets to go along with these designs. It will take some time to create masters for over 800 model rockets, so be sure to check our first-post site [ Ye Olde Rocket Forms in the BARCLONE | Designer’s Studio section ] to find which ones are now ready.
Contact SEMROC Astronautics for prices [ very reasonable!].
Triple Shot by Feyd
Arrow by C. P. McGraw
Binary Star by C. P. McGraw
Haffa-Hoot by C. P. McGraw
Minion by C. P. McGraw
Stratostar by C. P. McGraw
The BARCLONE Umbilical Tower 