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High Power RocketCam Videos
HaveNoMouth writes "What happens when the founder of Xircom and his brother bolt a DV Camcorder to the side of a 200 lb. model rocket and press the red button? The incredible movies (with sound!) at Gates Bros. Rocketry tell the tale. The quality of these movies is by far the best I've seen from the "strap a camera to a flying toy" community. They have a nice gallery of still photos too.
If only everyone named Gates did stuff this cool."
I'd rather see these on prime-time TV than glorified remote-controlled chainsaws destroying each other... The views of the horizon gliding into place is absolutely breathtaking!
BTW, if you had actually RTFA or watched the videos, you would know that they recover the rockets using parachutes - which keeps the camcorders from breaking apart when the rockets reacquaint themselves with terra firma.
If you really believe your own bullshit, what are you doing with a computer and an internet connection? For what you spend every month on your internet connection alone you could feed a starving child in Uganda for a year! I mean, really! Shame on you (and me)!
We should be volunteering at our local soup kitchens and donating all our spare cash to feed those poor starving children in some nameless backwater instead of surfing the web, watching TV, and playing with our modded Xboxes. After all, /. user number 601843 says so!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
With the camera sticking out of the side? Many, many rockets have been totally destroyed from just losing one fin. This series of rockets had a whole fairing bigger than a grapefruit protruding from it and it never tumbled. (except the one which had a parachute failure.)
The solution would be to have a pipe around the rocket, by the time the rocket exits the pipe full thrust would be generated, and before that the pipe would keep it more or less straigt. Or if you can have such a motor design which can go to full thurst in minimal time it would be great, but that is expensive.
If you want a safer demo of this you can try this. Take the ordinary fireworks rocket, the small one with the long stick which you put in a bottle and then ignote the fuse. You will see that the rocket goes quite save. Next take a smaller bottle and place the rocket so that the bottom of the stick is very near to top of botle. you will see that the initial thrust will have the rocket out of the bottle, but since the thrust is not enough yet the rocket will begin to fall sideways and by the time it falls power is max and you have a SSM!My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
What you need to do is to read this web page on how to design a stable rocket before you build one. Basically it all comes down to the last paragraph on the web page, which tells you to make sure you have the center of gravity closer to the nose than the center of pressure.
What you probably needed was to have more weight in the nose of the rocket and/or to use larger fins on the rocket. More weight in the nose would move the center of gravity toward the nose, larger fins would move the center of pressure toward the motor. If you had done this then the drag on the rocket from the air passing over it would have kept it straight up until it lost all upward velocity. Thus it would have not wobbled during the small delay between the first motor ending and the second motor getting up to speed.
Sapere aude!
I realize having Bill even reply to a Slashdot missive is far, far out into fantasyland, but here's what I've always been interested in.
Bill went from being a (perhaps upper-) middle-class Harvard student to the richest person on the planet in the space of fifteen years or so. That *had* to involve a large lifestyle change. While I'm not at all interested in his present personal affairs, I am interested in how he handled the transition from college drop-out to industry icon. I'd like to ask:
-How did you handle the transition from handling your own personal affairs (going down to the dealer to by a car, buying your own Pepsi and Fritos at the grocery, etc.) to having assistants and minions perform all these functions for you? When did this transition occur? At the time, did you view the transition positively or negatively (i.e., as one of the benefits of success, or one of the banes)?
-When was the last time you drove yourself to work on public roads, or flew on a commercial airline flight? When the transition to limousines and personal aircraft occurred, what was the rationalization (e.g., more time available for work, increased prestige, etc.) for their use?
-When did you first feel the need for 24x7 personal security? How did having people around you constantly affect your lifestyle? (Personally, I'd find it pretty creepy to have people monitoring me all the time--but even more creepy to realize that they were needed.)
-You were single a relatively long time, then married a woman who worked at your office. As the richest bachelor on the continent, I can imagine that the competition among the single women at MS for your attentions must have made Machiavelli look like a Sunday-school teacher. Were you aware of this? If so, how did you address the resulting problems with office politics? Did you suffer from the insecurity, so common among the wealthy and powerful, that everyone that meets you is more interested in your money and power than in you?
Just post the above in the "unavailable for comment" file....