A little Armadillo Aerospace news...

[Grall]

AA is in the running for a shot at the US$ 1M NASA Lunar Landing Competition X-prize. Read more at the link below, and there's also a link to a video of AA's rocket performing its arcane magics...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/09/21/armadillo-qualifies-for-megabuck-x-prize/

 

[Sxotty]

They already did it didn't they? They just need to wait for the other teams to go and see if their accuracy is better. When you read the writeup on AA's website they did very good despite crappy conditions. It was raining and everything they had planned would not work quite right.

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=367

 

[hoom]

I'm still too bitter at the failure of Kistler to get all excited about any other private space stuff
The K1 was totally the most practical of the various re-usable commercial rocket designs.

That said, this Armadillo one totally nailed that test.
Looked to have excellent stability & was it balanced entirely on the one rocket with no pif paf stuff?!

 

[Sxotty]

Hoom I believe so check out the links Armadillo is awesome b/c they give out oodles of information.

 

[Karoshi]

I'm still too bitter at the failure of Kistler to get all excited about any other private space stuff
The K1 was totally the most practical of the various re-usable commercial rocket designs.

That said, this Armadillo one totally nailed that test.
Looked to have excellent stability & was it balanced entirely on the one rocket with no pif paf stuff?!

In the downloadable WMV you can clearly see the one rocket exhaust plume rotating slightly to the sides a few degrees.

 

[Grall]

Looked to have excellent stability & was it balanced entirely on the one rocket with no pif paf stuff?!

Note to those who aren't familiar with the lingo... "pif paf stuff" is a deeply technical term in the field of rocketry.

 

[hoom]

Reaction Control System then

Pif Paf is apparently a French acronym (Pilotage induit en force—Pilotage aérodynamique en force) for the hybrid aerodynamic & RCS manoeuvring system on the Aster 15/30 SAMs but I'm pretty sure I've seen it used more colloquially for RCS systems in general, particularly in context of early VTOL planes

In the downloadable WMV you can clearly see the one rocket exhaust plume rotating slightly to the sides a few degrees.

Yes, that was why I was asking.

I had been under the impression that the previous model had 4 rockets to provide stability via variable thrust but now that I look at pics more closely, it seems that what I thought were 4 rockets were just the legs & it had a central rocket

 

[Sxotty]

Bump dead thread for fun new launch. 135k feet or something like that.

 

[Davros]

Allegedly if you look at the rocket quickly the paintwork is a blurry mess for the first 10 seconds

 

[Grall]

I guess Carmack screwed up the anisotropic filtering again then...

...Or is it the larger MIP levels that aren't loading properly? I thought they learned their lesson about blurry textures with Rage.

 

[Sxotty]

Yeah and the extension ladder is totally out of place on such a technical rocket...