I've been a big fan of the Nike Smoke for some time; it's just a gorgeous rocket. So as a Christmas present to myself a few years ago I bought a ScotGlas 4" Nike Smoke fibreglass nose cone. I thought that this along with owning a copy of Rockets of the World would kick start me into building a scale model; a few rounds of redundancy and no money soon put pay to that idea.

It was early 2004 when I decided that I should start to build some more rockets for the forthcoming flying season. I'm back in employment, although I'm getting married later this year, so there's still no money. It seems like ages since I've built anything, so it will be good to finally build something new and use the Nike Smoke nose cone.

I started work on designing the rocket at the start of March, but due to the complex nature of the design, it won't be finalised until it's nearly built. Now I know the Nike Smoke isn't a complicated rocket to build, but it is short, so if you want to do dual deployment things can get tricky, hence it's quite complicated inside the rocket.

To enable the use of larger motors, the motor mounts need to be quite long, so that eats away at the available space inside the rocket. The solution to this is to use the space inside the nose cone, as there's quite a lot of it. Unlike a conventional blow moulded plastic cone, the fibreglass cone doesn't have an end cap, so it's hollow. I'm going to put a section of 3" tubing in it to help accommodate the main parachute. Hopefully I'll get around thirteen or so inches of useable space, which is more than enough room for a large parachute.

With most of the design considerations out of the way the only thing left to decide on was what motor configuration to build into the rocket. I didn't want just another 38mm or 54mm motor mount as I've got those on other rockets; I wanted this one to be different. After a post to the uk.tech.rocketry newsgroup I settled on a 2x38mm + 2x29mm motor configuration, which means the rocket will only fly on either two or four motors. Why? I've wanted to build a high power cluster rocket for ages, so this rocket is going to be it.

I started the construction of the rocket when I was off work ill toward the end of March. I had one of those viruses where you're too ill to be at work, but not ill enough to be at home. Besides, it felt good to finally be building a rocket again, it's only been a couple of years since I finished the last one. I'll post updates to the construction page as things progress, hopefully the main parts of the rocket will be finished by Big EARS and the whole thing will be flyable by UKRA in June.

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Last update: Tuesday, 30-Mar-2004 03:46:12 EST