New year, old beans - WSR Launch, 1-16-22

 Our first scheduled launch of the year on New Year's Day had been scrubbed by bad weather, and judging by the predictions early in the week, things didn't look great for the January 15th launch either.  Temps wouldn't top 30 during the day and a sustained wind around 13mph would make the wind chill an uncomfortable reality and recovery an iffy proposition.  January 16th looked marginally better, with temps in the mid-30's and wind at about half the previous day's levels.  What it boiled down to was "Do you want to be really cold, or just cold?"  We wisely chose to fly on Sunday.

Sunday was cold.  I may have mentioned that.  It was cold as I loaded the car down south, 21 degrees according to the data center on my car.  I had washed an old pair of hunting overalls that had belonged to my father-in-law and had been stored in our garage for years.  They were lined, quilted and warm.  When zipped they also made my voice jump an octave or two.  Apparently, they aren't made to fit my Goony Island physique.  Popeye wept.  In any case, I dragged out the old flannel lined jeans from the VOA days, a Champion base layer from the football days, thermal socks and a large hoodie, all of which was topped by a lined leather parka and my Fudd hat.  Bring on your cold and hide the womenfolk.

Arriving at the field I found the bare bones of WSR.  The hard men.  The guys who would forsake a day of football by the fire for a day of flying in a frozen field with a winter storm taking dead aim.  My people.  My people had a fairly minimalist setup going, but all flavors were included.  After being compared to a social disease upon arrival, I was instructed to get flying if I had brought anything because it was iffy as to how long we'd keep the range up.  My people?  My first flight would be the TLP BOLO that had been on the pad at our previous launch before the wind detached the launch lug.

 This was my first TLP kit, and I built it as it came out of the package, as a short 24mm bird.  That was unusual, as the 24mm E had been a favorite of mine for several years at that point.  To this point I had only flown it once, and that flight had been a NARAM flight on a C11 to about 300'.  This time, launching with the wind in my face and the rod turned slightly into it, the Bolo left the pad heading away from us back over the high-power pads.  It topped out around 700-750', then tipped and was heading down when the ejection charge fired.  The chute was a 15" thin mil nylon chute and it popped immediately, and the BOLO began racing back toward us to our left.

We watched the BOLO cross the beans and finally come to a landing at the edge of the grass near the road.  I took off to recover it and couldn't find it, even with the bright yellow chute.  After puzzling over it for a few moments, I began walking on the other side of the road and finally saw the yellow chute.  Across the creek in the grass.  It would have to wait until later.

My second flight would be the Estes Beta Launch Vehicle, a kit I had for several years, but one that I only got interested in building last fall.  I opened it soon after I bought it via eBay, scanned it for YORP and have no idea where I put the decal, so I had to print a set off.  Not perfect, but it doesn't violate the ten foot rule.

How should I say this?  The Beta Launch Vehicle probably should have been a D12 bird, or at very least a C5.  It's quite the pig.  I didn't know of its piggish tendencies for this flight, so I chose a C6-5.  The five second delay was two too long, but that wouldn't cost me.  It left the pad slowly and struggled for altitude from the start, finally clawing its way to 400' or so.  As it tipped over, someone said "I hope that's a three."  I kinda wished it was, but the chute popped while it was still at a decent altitude and the BLV recovered in the beans, just off to our left and even with the mid-power pads.  Next flight will be on a C5-3.

Next on the pad would be my 90% finished Semroc Starlight.  It's complete except for the silver ring that will go around the mid-section but painting weather has been in short supply of late.  When I built it, I did so without the bottom ring, and since I had already gone off the reservation, I decided on a nontraditional paint scheme.  I was going to go with a full black body and orange nose cone with white central ring and accents down the edges of the fins, but while I was in the middle of the project, I realized that the colors were fairly close to the Centuri Taurus that is awaiting repair.  The idea changed right then, and now the ring will be silver.

When painting weather returns.

Again, this rocket is fairly piggish.  Must be my paint scheme.  The C6-5 had been loaded in this one since before the new year.  Like the BLV, this flight never quite looked comfortable on the C6-5.  Altitude was around 400', and the ejection charge fired just as the rocket tipped over.  Flight path was exactly the same as the BLV.

I was torn on this one.  I rushed to get the fiddly bits onto the rocket before the Saturday launch, only to have an extra day to work on it, but no weather to get a coat of primer on it.  This is another of the TLP produced rockets that I copied from the pics of the face cards on the old TLP site.  It's a BT-60 downscale of the SAAB 372 that I should have built as a D powered bird, but for some reason I went with E power.  Because of this, I had a moment of indecision at the field.  I had an extra D12-5, but didn't have an adapter.  Do I risk it in the fairly strong breeze?  Was it even a moment that I thought this?

This was an interesting flight, and in the end likely the only one that will ever be made on an E motor.  I put a decent amount of nose weight in it, but I was still a bit nervous about the stability.  It left the pad and immediately began wiggling, and I braced myself for the ultimate windmill ending.  It never came.  The SAAB straightened itself out and took off at a 45 degree angle toward Federal Road.  I was thinking landshark, but the ascent never wavered.  Altitude was around 600', less than expected, but more than I thought it would be when it left the pad twerking.  It looked to be across Federal Road when it ejected, but when I got to the landing site, I found it less than ten feet from the road.

With an E flight out of the way, I could try a cluster.  I actually had two cluster birds on my traveling list for this launch, but completely forgot the Astron Ranger when packing up.  Luckily I also brought the Semroc Defender.

This would be a 3xB6-4 flight, and it was an impressive liftoff, with all three motors lit and the flame quite visible in the overcast conditions.  It left the pad heading straight out into the field behind the high power pads.  Ejection came as it was still heading upward, but close enough to apogee to be non violent.  The wind immediately brought it rapidly back our way, but to the right.  It landed 150' in the beans on the other side of the creek and when I retrieved it an hour later I found that it had cracked a fin on the frozen furrows.

Next up was an oldie, an EAC Viper that I'd picked up as part of an eBay lot back in the days when old lots of rockets turned up frequently at auction.  The Viper was a badly chewed bird that had lost a fin at some point, and had then been converted to a 3fnc bird.  It last flew back in 2003, and I'd planned to fly it once, then build a new one around the old nose cone, but it was not a project that inspired a lot of movement.  Back in 2020 when I was socially distant launching at B6-4 Field, the Viper was one of the mini engine birds I took along with me for a day of flying.  On that day as I was trying to put a motor in, the whole motor mount pushed into the body tube, the brittle old glue finally giving up the fight after an unknown number of decades.  

The A10-3T flight was as expected, stable, low-level and perfectly acceptable for small field flying.  Seemed a bit like playing a wiffle ball game in Great American Ballpark here in the beans, but a 19 year layoff between flights is a reason to go big.  The cold temps on the day kept the parachute recovery as a parawad, but even that was enough for a successful recovery.  

Sticking with the eBay theme, the next flight would be a vintage Estes Star Trek bird, not the Enterprise or Vulcan ship, but the odd plastic fin and nose cone ARTF rocket.  I actually got the whole starter kit along with this one.  It last flew in 2013, its only flight to date.

The flight was pretty much the standard on the day, straight out over the high power pads, but with the added late afternoon change in wind direction to make cross creek recoveries the norm rather than the exception.  The flight topped out around 500', then drifted back at us on the parawad chute, which was too cold to fully inflate.  Probably a good thing.  It may have been unrecoverable on a full chute.

  

By this time, it had started snowing steadily, small pellets as opposed to big flakes that would make my 90-minute trip home turn into a three-hour tour.  I still had two rockets that I wanted to fly, the mini-engine Scout III and the standard Semroc Scout.  Both were recently finished and hadn't flown in more than five years.  The Scout III would be first to the pad while the Scout waited its turn on the LCO table.  The Scout hasn't flown since 2012, so a case can be made for it to have been the one I picked, especially since it would have been an A8-3 flight, but catsup ketchup, right?

This would be a quick flight, an A10-3T with nose blow recovery, hoping to keep it on the left side of the creek.  As expected, it left in a blink, and I was able to track the flight after it cleared the pad by following the smoke trail.  Then, nothing.  For three seconds.  The ejection charge fired, and we were able to track it as it fell back to the field.  It wasn't looking good at first, looking like it would wind up in the middle of the creek, but it began following the fins and cleared the creek by ten feet plus.

I made the drive around the creek and recovered the Scout III, as well as two other birds.  On the return trip I noticed Loopy looking toward the creek with a blank look on his face.  I looked into the water to see what he was looking at and saw a kangaroo slip quickly beneath the surface of the water.  I rolled down the window and asked Loopy if he'd seen it.  He looked at me blankly as though seeing me for the first time that day.  "See what?" he replied blankly.  I later found out that kangaroos aren't native to central Ohio beanfields, nor are they known to swim.  Apparently I'd seen an otter.

WSR beanfield launch, Cedarville, Ohio - 12/12/21

 To be honest, I wasn't 100% sure this launch was going to come off, and once it looked like it was going forward, I wasn't sure I was going to make it.  It takes the better part of an hour and a half to go from Fort Thomas, KY to Cedarville, OH, and I wasn't sure I had it in me.

Oh, who am I kidding.  Yeah, I was dragging a bit.  Yeah, I got off to a slow start and didn't hit the road until after 11.  No, I never seriously considered not going, even after having gotten my December flight checkmark the previous Saturday.  I had vacation time wedged in there and used a bit of it to finish a few projects I had going.  As usual, I had a box of rocket mixed between never flown and not flown in a long time.  First on the pad would be one of the long-timers, an Estes Sprint upscale that I built before they came out with their own Sprint XL.

This rocket was built in 2012 and last flew back in the spring of 2013 in what was planned to be the later paint scheme.  It was damaged on that flight and the Estes kit showed up that year and was the giveaway kit at NARAM, but I had a change of heart about the paint scheme.  That finally happened this past spring when I repaired and repainted my scratch build in Astron Sprint livery.  I even managed to use the Estes Powered eyeball decal.  

The Sprint XXL spent a lot of time on the pad for having only one flight.  There was one burnt igniter and one change of clips before it finally got launched.  The flight was an eye-opener, the kind of bird that really shows what an E12-6 flight could be like.  The Astron Sprint is known to be a high flying design, and experience tells me that the upscale is as well.  This flight seemed like it would never reach apogee, a burn that went on long past the point that you expected burnout.  The flight crossed the creek to our right and wound up deep in the beanfield.  I was feeling really good about my chance of a close recovery at this point, then came the ejection.  At first it looked to be recovering as I expected it would, then it stopped descending.  There was no chance of it being a thermal.  Temps were in the upper 30's at the time of the flight,  I was wearing gloves.  And a serious hat.  It was freaking cold.  Apparently the Sprint didn't read the forecast.  Once again, I felt like Fred Flintstone in the monster costume, "watching and waving, watching and waving".  My Astron Stinger was obviously lost earlier the previous week, but I thought I might stand a chance of recovering the big Sprint just based on the amount of space we were dealing with.  It cleared the driveway that led to the farmhouse, but by what appeared to be by only about 20 feet or so.  The combination of the mud and the fact that I had a ready-made parking space made the idea of walking after it idiotic.  

I drove up and down the driveway twice once I reached the house.  Saw nothing.  Then on my second pass the parachute caught my eye when a breeze blew it up.  It was WAY more than 20 feet in.  More like 200 feet, and the mud was very obviously bad.  I had my mud boots on, so I started in.  After several minutes of head-down slogging I looked up, expecting to be within a few feet, only to find that a) I was still 100 feet away, and b) slogging through mud is a killer workout.  My boots seemed to weigh 40 pounds each.  I felt like I was slogging uphill through the mud.  Stopping for even a moment began a definite trend toward middle earth, which only served to clot the mud higher up on my pants.  As my heart threatened mutiny, I kept the slog going forward.  Eventually I arrived, not quite at the rocket, but within a long stretch of a fin.  At least I knew to hold the body away from myself when I pulled the shock cord to unstick it from the mud.  I took the dry route back.  No.  There was nothing that resembled a dry route.  Back at the car I nearly broke a hip swinging my feet to loosen the mud.  Was I having fun yet?  Apparently I was.

Once I was done unclotting my boots, I picked the newly painted FRW Long Distance Voyager as mt second flight.  This is a BT70 upscale with 2xD12-5 power, so I was hoping that I'd be able to avoid another deep trip into the mud on recovery.  Turned out to be an excellent choice, but not for the reason that I initially expected it to be.

 

From the moment it cleared the launch rod it was obvious that something was wrong.  The Voyager was struggling to gain altitude, taking "slow, realistic take off" to a whole new level.  The flight was dead straight to 300' or so.  I had expected windcocking due to the big fin surfaces and had set the rod straight to cut down on the distance that it crossed the creek.  It never approached the creek.

This was far and away my straightest flight on the day, and as a result, the recovery drift was fairly deep into the beans.  When I reached the landing zone I found just what everyone had expected.  Only one of the D12-5 motors had lit.  All in all, it was a respectable flight for one D12.  

Since I had a ready to go D12-5, I picked the TLP Bolo to be my third flight of the day.  This one last flew in 2013 at NARAM, but when I was building it, I had grabbed the wrong nose cone.  I finally got around to repainting the correct nose cone back in the summer and it looks just like the face card again.

I guess it might have been a good idea to change out the igniter before I tried to reuse the motor because it sat through a round on the pad.  When I went out to switch to a new igniter, the launch lug pulled off as I slid it up the rod.  Looks like the second flight of the Bolo will have to wait for the next go-round in the beans on 1-1-22.

I subbed in a first flight rocket, the Semroc Hydra One, still in primer but recently finished and itching to get some airtime.  I spent several years on this build, my fault entirely because I tried to build it without the instructions.  At night on lunch break at my desk.  I got some of the fins glued on in the wrong places and had to peel them off, trying to salvage them as best as I could.  Did I mention that eRockets sells the fin set separately?

This was not quite ready for my previous launch at B6-4 Field where it would have flown on a B6-4.  Here the flight would be on a C6-5 with a bit less angle on the rod.  Despite this, the flight left the pad heading right at a fairly aggressive angle, pretty much the same as the Sprint XXL.  It topped out around the 600-700' point, popped the chute just as it tipped, and began heading back to the good side of the creek.  Two of the shroud lines ripped and the chute collapsed in on itself, so the recovery wasn't terribly deep in the beans, landing two steps in the mud just off the grass.  Since the rocket was still in primer, nature provided me with some extra fill & finish to sand off along the whole length of the rocket.  I wish I could say I was looking forward to painting this bird.

 I'll be honest.  The long recovery slog on flight #1 had taken a lot of the spring out of my step, so I made the decision to fly smaller birds the rest of the day.  I still had two first flight birds that I wanted to try, the Semroc Laser X being one of them.  This is an oldie, and was actually a low numbered kit that I picked up from Carl the minute he posted that it was available.  Construction was started soon after it arrived, but then stopped when my wife started making moving noises.  Parts got scattered in the move, and were only recently gathered together again.

I REALLY didn't want another slog through the mud, so this would be a B6-4 flight.  The flight followed the traditional route, over the creek with the wind to about 400-450', then a full chute drift downrange into one of the areas on the field with the most standing water.  I was walking that way with a teenage girl who was recovering an Alpha III and told her that her best bet would be to approach from behind the large puddle/small pond, but she headed off into the muck at a direct angle toward her Alpha.  Fifteen feet in she stopped to decide on a different route and sunk calf deep in the mud.  I waded out to get her unstuck and we both approached from behind the puddle.  As I walked down I noticed that the Laser X chute was still actively catching the breeze with every gust and bashing the upper section into the mud.  I had recently sanded, primed, fill & finished, sanded and primed it all at home, expecting to paint when I got home, but all the mud bashing has given it another coat of natural fill & finish to sand off.  Glad to finally get this one some flight time.

By the time I returned from the Laser X flight it was approaching 4:00pm, which meant that my next flight would likely be my last on the day.  I began prepping the Rocketarium Trident T117-13, a rare first flight bird in that it was completely painted.  I'd started construction on this and the Semroc Jupiter B last year around this time when I got stuck at our remote location for work and needed something to pass the long hours between actual things to do.  It turned out looking cool and I'm now trying to decide if I need to make the next purchase the 18 or 24mm version. 

I borrowed a clip whip from WSR prez Dave "Love Shack" Combs and hooked the three A3-4T motors up.  At liftoff it was obvious that something was off, which was confirmed at ejection when we heard two distinct ejection charges instead of three.  As with the earlier 2xD12-5 flight of the Voyager, I'd missed on one of the cluster motors.  Altitude was still respectable at 600' but the bonus on the flight was the landing; one step off the grass in the mud.  My legs would live to recover another day.

Muddy, but victorious, I stuck around to help strike the range and load everything out.  Normally a Sunday launch would have me rushing to get home because of work in the morning, but this launch had fallen during our December Christmas shopping vacation, so I was able to head home at my leisure, listening to the Bengals do everything in their power to gag a winnable game against the 49er's.  Some things just never change.