Weight Modification​s
Once we got back from break, we were informed that our rocket's nosecone would not come off properly (and the rocket would not get high enough) if we didn't shed some weight off our rocket. Once we knew this information, we had to change our rocket completely, much like Mark Watney changed the Ares 4 MAV in Andy Weir's novel, The Martian. The following photos and descriptions show our documentation process as we completely changed our model rocket. Click on a photo to enlarge it and show a description.
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Note: The references to photos (such as "above" or "to the left") may not apply to mobile versions of the website.
The photos above and to the right show the early stages of our design process. We started out by brainstorming ways we could lose weight while still keeping a 1 ounce weight on our rocket (nuclear bomb for Iran). Some of the ideas we came up with included:
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1. Cut off the outer edges of the parachute
2. Take off part of the top of the rocket body
3. Make the fins smaller
4. Take out one of our fireproof tissue papers (didn't do this)
5. Remove the nosecone and use the contraption as a nosecone
6. Shorten the inner plastic tube
7. Remove one of the cardboard inner circles (used for support)
8. Restart building the rocket (didn't consider this)
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After brainstorming, we started to put our ideas into action. We started by shortening the rocket body; we completely removed one of our rocket body tubes. This made our rocket half the size it once was. In doing this, we had to remove our company name, and move the branding flags to the bottom of the rocket (flags and company name shown to the right).
The photos above and to the right show our parachute design. We changed our parachute design back to the original size that we used on egg drop testing day. The photo on the far left shows the larger parachute, and the other two photos show the parachute after it was cut. We reduced the parachute size because of the weight constraints and the smaller egg we were using (it is now a quail egg instead of a chicken egg). This will also allow our parachute to fit into our smaller rocket more easily.
The photos to the left show the inside of our rocket. Both photos show the shortened size of the inner plastic tube. We cut this tube proportionally with the outer rocket tube. We also removed the upper inner cardboard circle, which was used for support but can now be removed because of our smaller rocket size (this also took away weight). Our fins were also shortened, which is shown in the top right photo. We did this to reduce weight and to move the fins below the center of pressure (see the Center of Pressure page for more). We then removed the foam nosecone, and used the egg drop contraption as a nosecone by itself. This saved us a lot of money and cut down on a large amount of our weight.
In conclusion, our contraption was changed in the following ways:
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1. We cut off the outer edges of the parachute
2. We took off the top half of our rocket body
3. We made our fins smaller
4. We removed the nosecone, and used the egg drop contraption as a nosecone
6. We shortened the inner plastic tube proportionally with the rocket body tube
7. We removed one of the cardboard inner circles
8. We were allowed to remove the 1 ounce nuclear bomb, and we will bring it on another Ares mission
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After these modifications, we got our rocket weight down to about 2.8 ounces (using the average quail egg weight). This was good, considering that we started with almost 5 ounces of weight!