"You're doing it wrong"Chthonic confesses: "Only last year did I discover why the lids of things in tubes have a recessed pointy bit built into them." Tell us about the facepalm moment when you realised you were doing something wrong.
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Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 15 Jul 2010, 13:23)
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Sputnik 1 it wasn't.Ian's an amateur rocketeer. It takes his small group about three years to plan, design, build and get approval for a liquid fuelled launch.
So after years of work on their latest effort, they loaded it all up on a fleet of vehicles and headed out into western New South Wales. Came the glorious day, in the morning calm, just right for a launch. Cameras and recording gear rolling, gave the countdown and Fire!
The rocket took off smoothly but after a few seconds it started to wobble. It only got worse. Blokes scatterered around the scrub vainly looking for trees to hide behind as the thing roared over their "safety barrier" like a demented shuttlecock with extreme indigestion. Luckily the wobble pointed it up again and finally it ran out of fuel, just a few hundred metres up.
The parachute popped as it was supposed to and the missile came back to earth.
The post flight analysis? There were no baffles in the fuel tanks, the sloshing fuel had overwhelmed their guidance system.
"Who built the fuel tanks?" I asked
"Errr - - me" said Ian.
(, Sat 17 Jul 2010, 9:33, 1 reply)
"a demented shuttlecock with extreme indigestion"gets a click from me
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Damien's Hearse, Sat 17 Jul 2010, 16:43,
closed)
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