VERY COOL. thank you very much for the pics. Had inventory
today annnd my first day back on weekends for a while.

Was nice to come home and be part of the launch.

thanks

Most of my pictures did not turn out, but it was a learning process on how to photograph high velocity rockets.

Today's event was my first for NCR and my wife and I fell in love with it. Even my little "maggot" of a dog thought this was fun.

Since I have accepted the duties of Webmaster, you should be able to upload your (and even my own pictures) and be able to display them on the website without having to link them to other image websites.

Sorry guys, but things like this will take me a few more days to figure out!

Send me your images of the 7 Jan 12 launch to my private email and I will get them displayed on the website ASAP.

huntworksteve@gmail.com

Comments:

The best flight of the day was Bear's glider. He needs to make some minor adjustments, but there was not a single person present with that launch that was not excited!

Best rocket that I saw today never even launched!

He was located next to my car and wanted to obtain his level 1 certification today. I listened for the next hour, as some outstanding club members went over his rocket and helped him insure that the first flight will be perfect.

Believe me, since I am about to obtian my leval 1 certification, I was listening to every single word!!!

Because he had not done prior ground testing of the dual deployment, the wisdom was to perform those tests today, before any actual launch.

I had to agree, because his rocket was the most amazing that I saw all day and I would cry if it did not deploy it's recovery properly!
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In future events, would it be possible to coordinate things a little better?

Each and every rocket that is launched is expensive in either time or money. I observed today that everyone watching a launch was intently looking for the parachute and where is was going to land.

Simple reason: My rocket will need your help to track also!

Observation: Often, two or three rockes were launched rapidly before the previous one had landed. It was very difficult to track one parachute, when there was a new rocked being launched.

I could understand this, if there was a long waiting line. Instead, we would often have three rapid launches and then a 30 minute waiting time.

Eventually, even my "maggot" dog got bored and fell asleep in the car.

1) Get your rockets ready for launch and wait in line!

2) No next rocket gets launched until we know where the last one has landed (or at least in what county.)

Great photos! I'm thrilled to have the input and basically agree with the launch procedure you are suggesting. However, I'm guessing the cold helped speed things along and as the weather gets nicer, the crowd gets larger, the wait gets longer and while it's fun to watch every rocket in flight and descent, it is really the fliers responsibility to be their own eyes and request others help if needed. The LCO is supposed to watch long enough to verify that deployment has occurred and move on. Extra eyes are always appreciated on every flight, especially when something errant is occurring or the vehicle is descending into the crowd. Yesterday's event was sort of a cobweb clearing day as we haven't had a launch since last October. Not making excuses, per say, because all too often we don't have a specific person or people assigned to specific duties. We are all volunteers.

Looks like I missed a great time. From down here in the big city, weather didn't look good up north, so I went to work instead. Great pictures.

Just goes to show ya, even a bad day (far from it) launching rockets is better than a day at work. For what it's worth, weather forecasters were spot on with predicted conditions for the day. It did get cold and windy and basically nasty enough to minimize the fun.

For helping recovering rockets, I find that if I stand at or near the trailer, have the compass on my phone set up, watch the launch, and watch where the bird is last seen, (if I can see it), find the angle from north that the bird was last seen, and then walk in that direction, I have been 100% successful in retrieval. If I get off course, then I line up on the trailer again and move to wherever I need to be to be back on line with the compass. If I am out of site of the trailer, I watch for smoke trails going up and line up on those; I should not be very far off in my search. I am sure others do the same thing. Now if you have a spotter, and with T-mobile and Verizon working at the sites, you should be able to call your spotter and vice-versa on your cell phones, to use them like walkie-talkies. As long as you can see it coming down, you should be able to get it back. If you can't, then you need tracking gear. The main thing would be to not launch if there is a deployment over the pads and wait for the bird to get downrange; and to double check that there was deployment so that we do not get a lawn dart on top of us. I may be wrong, but that is my humble opinion. Of course the launch director has final say, and depending on the line and the event, these conditions can remain quite dynamic. I may be completely out in left field, but that is my thinking on the topic. The more difficult situation could be if you are flying a glider that deploys a pod, or multiple gliders, or multi-stage birds, or if you are coming apart and have many pieces falling. then I would think that you might want to have three, four or more spotters to go after the parts, and the spotters continue on in this effort until it is known that all the pieces are being tracked and someone is working on the recovery. It might also help to have a good set of eyes equipped with field glasses to watch for those really high flying birds. ( I know that I failed to do that last year and I have a Cesaroni 29mm-3G lying around at the north site with NO identification on it and a nose cone off of a Mean Machine with an Altimeter 1 attached to it and no identification. (So even if you think everything is great, if you can label and/or identify your parts somehow, then they can find their way home.) It also reminds me of the CAP bird that had James Russell's motors installed in the cluster. I found three un-burned motors augered in on the way out to the away pad in preparation for launching Mark Lionberger's Nike Smoke back at Oktoberfest. Those motors did not have labels on them either. If you are prepared for the un-expected (like three motors not firing and being ejected from the fin can, then you might have better fortune at recovering all the components and pieces.) This all can happen if we go out of our way to help everyone and train others in doing the same. 😉

Since we haven't worked out all the webmaster transition details, I thought I'd add a thought here.

IF you directly embed pictures into a posting, please limit the image size to 640x480 pixels maximum - otherwise is totally screws up the page format in the forums not to mention directly affects our storage quota on our web hosting service.

The BEST way to post photos is to post them to Picassa or Flickr or some other photo hosting site and post a link within your forum post. Images these days can be quite large and we DO have a maximum storage limit that is impacted by the size and number of photos.

Maybe simple instructions or FAQ answers as to how to do so is necessary for those of us that don't totally understand what you're suggesting....

Well Joe, since I don't use those services myself, I'm not the best person to write that up. I would suggest Mike Shinn or Ray LaPanse as they are the most prolific photographers and documenters of our launches.

My main point is this - we are getting close to our quota and our hosting plan will end up being more expensive or we will have to start auto-pruning the forums, something I don't want to see happen.

And here I thought cyber space was infinite. 🙄 What I meant is that somewhere there ought to be "Sticky" post or information page for Forum Rules, including the posting of links/photos. Some Forums will accept attachments, others allow direct posting and then proper sizing or lenght of video becomes an issue. A lot of the photo sharing services out there have their own set of rules as well and not everyone is a Picasa or Flicker or Photoshare or what have you member. I thought this web page had it's own photo logging thing - Coppermine or something, but no one seems to really use it probably because of complicated rules as well.

I'm not suggesting teaching HTML or programming - just simple guidelines on sizing content to be posted as an FYI to all users.

Well silly me - there already is a Forum FAQ which helps direct us on how and what to do regarding the use of these forums.

The web truly offers an infinite bounty Joe... the site probably could do with some simplification to make some of the articles easier to find. Hopefully Steve will provide.

Gents, I posted links to photos that are held for free at Imageshack. This shouldn't take up space on our forum. This is how every other forum has their image linking set up.