We used OpenRocket for designing our rocket for UK youth rocketry competition UKROC[1].
It is great for getting a 'spherical cow in a vaccuum' idea of likely altitude with different motors, centre of pressure, center of mass etc. But it obviously doesn't take account of detailed aerodynamics etc and we found the maximum altitude estimates were about 15% too high. But it was still very useful.
[1] UKROC is an amazing competition for UK school kids. And there are equivalent competitions in the US, France and Japan, with an International competition for the 4 country winners. If you know any kids interested in engineering I recommend you look into it.
This application gets used a lot in the High Power Rocketry hobby. Most of the parts/manufactures are included as well as motor manufactures. The simulations are very good and accurate, I would sim my larger builds at the location where i was launching to get an idea of altitude and it was always pretty close ( within 5-10% i'd say ).
I use to have a website where you could upload an openrocket file and get back 2d drawings for your fins that could then be sent to my lasercutting service. The idea was design the rocket in openrocket, send me the file, and get back the wooden pieces you need cut per the design. Similar to sendcutsend but for the rocketry hobby.
This is pretty cool. I remember having fun simulating my rockets using the BASIC programs from G. Harry Stine's "Handbook of Model Rocketry" when I was a kid. This looks like a way to recreate some of that fun.
Just reading the name I wouldn't have been surprised if it had nothing to do with rockets whatsoever - I was half expecting it to be some kind of "agentic platform to accelerate your product development" etc.
Well THAT's cool. I was just talking about getting back into model rocketry... I'm not sure my 6yo daughter will like it as much as I did/do but I want to get back into it and launch a few and see if she's into it. Timing here is great as I need to start looking at starting from scratch with kits etc.
Does anyone know of something similar, but for aircraft and/or drones? I’ve been 3D printing model aircraft with my 8-year old but would be great to take it to the next level.
There is a game on Steam where you can design and fly your own aircraft. Would be fun to then try to 3d print the successful ones. But I can't remember the name of the game, sorry.
Amateurs have reached the karman line, orbit is still pretty much out of reach. The people who get close to the karman line use two stage passive stabilized airframes and solid fuel motors. The airframes are basically works of art and it takes a lot of luck because of passive stabilization and Mach 3+ speeds. Many pictures of these rockets have their paint and leading fin edges burned off when they're recovered. Propellent is expensive and an attempt at > 100k feet is about $5-6k an attempt in propellent alone.
Check out the liquid bi-prop engines the halfcat guys have, apparently they were just certified by the HPR hobby governing organization Tripoli which means they can be insured at sponsored launches. With a liquid fueled engine you can do thrust vectoring (nozzle gymbaling) easier than solid fuel motors so active stabilization is more feasible. If you have active stabilization then all you need is thrust to weight > 1, enough fuel, and you'll eventually get to whatever altitude you want. Orbit means orbital velocity and that's just a whole other ball game.
Space Concordia, a Canadian university space-oriented student group, which is sort of amateur-level given that it’s driven by students and donations, attempted to reach space not that long ago with a liquid fueled single staged rocket. Here is a video of the launch https://www.youtube.com/live/610YciEs8qg?t=4594&is=aAWo8Y7vi...
Thank you so much for sharing this video, it's just amazing to see a bunch of young amateurs getting so excited about things that would have been virtually inaccessible 20 years ago.
Might be worth checking out the "Copenhagen Suborbitals" group (they have a YouTube channel) and see if they're still active! It's been years but I think I recall they were trying to build something capable of getting a person into space (not sure if orbit was a goal).
Distance is usually the wrong measure in space. Something like delta-v will give you a much better scaling as once you manage to get something to orbit the rest is actually a lot closer than it would seem on the ground.
Not to say the effort somehow becomes peanuts, cheap, or easy... but the jump in delta-v needed to go from "100 km vertical ascent" to "hit the moon 350,000 km away" is more like a ~6-7x increase than a 3,500x one. If the moon were instead 700,000 km away the factor would still be ~6-7x.
Im guessing that all the sudden interest in rocketry and drones is related to the war in the middle east? Because I have found that very interesting too, that a country as poor and as heavily sanctioned as Iran is managing to hold out the mightiest human forces the world has ever seen.
Only someone coming out of the US education system can have both the power to start such a war and the complete lack of knowledge needed to think it would go well...
> a country as poor and as heavily sanctioned as Iran
It's one of the oldest civilization in the world
It's not poor by any means, it's the 20th economy in the world
They produce as many engineers per year as the US, and they're not financial engineers or saas coders, fyi:
> mid-14c. enginour, "constructor of military engines," from Old French engigneor "engineer, architect, maker of war-engines; schemer"
Sanctioned for half a century means they developed other ways to live and survive
What do they hold, exactly? Leaders are dead and keeps dying, good chunk of their military is defunkt, while "mightiest human forces" don't even have boots on ground.
The strait of hormuz is still closed, and a new government has not been installed.
From a conventional perspective Iran is by all means "losing" the war. However, the United States and the majority of the world desperately want the strait to be opened and have so far been unsuccessful in preventing Iran from blocking it. The US is also greatly interested in regime change, which has also been unsuccessful.
Agree with what others have said. And will add that under Trump US was losing soft power around the world. But attacking Iran accelerated that process significantly.
Most of our allies feel that they can give us the middle finger when we ask for help. More people around the world than ever before now think that US and Israel are the biggest threat to world peace.
This is new and uncharted territory for us. We will pay a bigger price for this over the coming years and decades than whatever we did to Iran.
I highly recommend you to open a few foreign newspaper and lurk in foreign forums, groups, &c. you're either misinformed or blind
> don't even have boots on ground
Anyone with half a brain cell knows this would be the biggest strategic, tactical and political blunder of the century
> What do they hold, exactly?
What they hold exactly is:
- middle eastern countries who've been greasing Washington's palms for influence and protection received 0 protection, it'll take decades to rebuild any trust here
- Americans deserted their bases in the region instantly, they are now damaged or destroyed, the US conveniently ask satellite image providers to delay the release of new data
- Lost a bunch (most?) of radars from their early warning system in the region
- US sailors seemingly set their own ship on fire to avoid deployment
- Depleted israel interceptor stocks, more and more things are passing through the dome
- the US spent 12b so far to fuck up Iran, Russia made 6b from the gas price increase in the meantime, big brain move
- the US pulling out of asia to send more shit to the middle east, eroding trust of countries like South Korea
- Israel support in the US is falling fast, in the EU it's gone
- the price of everything will slowly rise, because everything we use rely on gas one way or another, they've been sanctioned for 50 years they don't give a shit anymore.
- the US showing their complete lack of strategical vision, saying something on monday, the opposite on tuesday and denying they even said either things by wednesday
I helped out with a user interface redesign of OR many years ago. It was pretty incredibly unintuitive back then, and many hobby rocketeers paid for Rocksim instead.
Building a rocket shell is probably just fine: you need to fuel yet - that you can't 3D print. probably fine...
Overall 3d printing is a lot more than ghost guns and ghost rockets. That the conversation dominates this small sub-section reeks of 'think-of-the-children' screeching that hides explicit power grabs in regulation and surveillance with the main intent seemingly to be 'enforce copywrite' (of only the big players that can afford to throw their weight around).
i've recently had youtube randomly suggest me a video where this dude was building his own opensource manpads, with a single rocket costing under $100 in parts (there was no explosive payload so that makes it just a rocket and not a missile, i guess). not long after, someone posted it here on hn but i think it's been removed (by the mods, i imagine) since.
i find these projects both fascinating and terrifying. seeing a single person building what normally involves huge defense corporations and government contracts, these things in their bedroom is amazing. it shows how information wants to be free and how ingenious people can get with whatever motivates them.
The knowledge and skill in the HPR (high power rocketry) hobby is definitely there to build basic weapon systems. Active stabilization using movable fins is a thing, onboard gps and flight controllers are also a thing. Nobody puts it together end to end though because it gives the whole hobby a bad look and the hobby governing organizations strongly discourage it too. Also, fortunately, most people have no interest in mass murder either. Much of the hobby is old engineers who are retired but still want to work on engineering projects in their garage.
I know; I thought they'd have a handy parts list on their new site. But you are right; I should have looked in their Google Drive docs. There's a section - "Bill of materials and cost breakdown", but details are buried somewhere. Thanks, though.
Model rocketry, as a hobby, enjoys a limited amount of regulation, at least in the US. In large part, that is because the community has been very good about self-policing. Most folks who are serious about the hobby closely follow the safety guidelines published by the two national organizations (Tripoli and NAR), and steer newcomers to as well. Serious accidents are few and far between, intentional damage even more so. Compare this to, say, drones, which seem to be more widely embraced by the public, but are much more closely regulated and have been implicated in a number of serious incidents like https://abcnews.com/US/drone-operator-charged-hitting-super-... . Model and amateur rockets are cool. Folks mis-using them are going to run into a lot of pushback from pretty much every direction, because it'd only take an incident or two to ruin the hobby for everyone.
idk off hand but i'm sure there's something like OpenRocket for R/C airplanes. Where you put in the dimensions, wing type, mass distribution, and other stuff and it tells you if it's aerodynamically stable or not. After that you put in an ardupilot autopilot+gps+airspeed sensor and there's your drone. iirc, with ardupilot you can do automated flight planning like "fly to this gps coordinate, orbit for 10 minutes, fly home" etc.
to relate to OpenRocket, some people are into rocket powered gliders and use autopilots to make flying them after launch easier. It's basically a fly by wire setup so controlling the glider is on easy-mode with the autopilot doing most of the work keeping things stable while the human with the controller just focuses on making the slow circles back to the launch area. These autopilots are how typical quadcopter drones can be flown easily without the wind and 4 motors causing havoc constantly.
I know you want to tell us all about the amazing (sincerely!) stuff under the hood, but to users, the interface is the product.
It is great for getting a 'spherical cow in a vaccuum' idea of likely altitude with different motors, centre of pressure, center of mass etc. But it obviously doesn't take account of detailed aerodynamics etc and we found the maximum altitude estimates were about 15% too high. But it was still very useful.
[1] UKROC is an amazing competition for UK school kids. And there are equivalent competitions in the US, France and Japan, with an International competition for the 4 country winners. If you know any kids interested in engineering I recommend you look into it.
https://www.ukroc.com/
I use to have a website where you could upload an openrocket file and get back 2d drawings for your fins that could then be sent to my lasercutting service. The idea was design the rocket in openrocket, send me the file, and get back the wooden pieces you need cut per the design. Similar to sendcutsend but for the rocketry hobby.
Really cool seeing it show up on HN.
I think I need to go for a walk.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/397340/SimplePlanes/
This guy is widely respected in the hobby and this flight made it to 293k feet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmv7G6Rf5WE
Check out the liquid bi-prop engines the halfcat guys have, apparently they were just certified by the HPR hobby governing organization Tripoli which means they can be insured at sponsored launches. With a liquid fueled engine you can do thrust vectoring (nozzle gymbaling) easier than solid fuel motors so active stabilization is more feasible. If you have active stabilization then all you need is thrust to weight > 1, enough fuel, and you'll eventually get to whatever altitude you want. Orbit means orbital velocity and that's just a whole other ball game.
https://www.halfcatrocketry.com/
So the jump from the former to the latter is... significant.
Not to say the effort somehow becomes peanuts, cheap, or easy... but the jump in delta-v needed to go from "100 km vertical ascent" to "hit the moon 350,000 km away" is more like a ~6-7x increase than a 3,500x one. If the moon were instead 700,000 km away the factor would still be ~6-7x.
Cool site for delta-v estimates https://deltavmap.github.io/
> a country as poor and as heavily sanctioned as Iran
It's one of the oldest civilization in the world
It's not poor by any means, it's the 20th economy in the world
They produce as many engineers per year as the US, and they're not financial engineers or saas coders, fyi:
> mid-14c. enginour, "constructor of military engines," from Old French engigneor "engineer, architect, maker of war-engines; schemer"
Sanctioned for half a century means they developed other ways to live and survive
From a conventional perspective Iran is by all means "losing" the war. However, the United States and the majority of the world desperately want the strait to be opened and have so far been unsuccessful in preventing Iran from blocking it. The US is also greatly interested in regime change, which has also been unsuccessful.
Most of our allies feel that they can give us the middle finger when we ask for help. More people around the world than ever before now think that US and Israel are the biggest threat to world peace.
This is new and uncharted territory for us. We will pay a bigger price for this over the coming years and decades than whatever we did to Iran.
> don't even have boots on ground
Anyone with half a brain cell knows this would be the biggest strategic, tactical and political blunder of the century
> What do they hold, exactly?
What they hold exactly is:
- middle eastern countries who've been greasing Washington's palms for influence and protection received 0 protection, it'll take decades to rebuild any trust here
- Americans deserted their bases in the region instantly, they are now damaged or destroyed, the US conveniently ask satellite image providers to delay the release of new data
- Lost a bunch (most?) of radars from their early warning system in the region
- US sailors seemingly set their own ship on fire to avoid deployment
- Depleted israel interceptor stocks, more and more things are passing through the dome
- the US spent 12b so far to fuck up Iran, Russia made 6b from the gas price increase in the meantime, big brain move
- the US pulling out of asia to send more shit to the middle east, eroding trust of countries like South Korea
- Israel support in the US is falling fast, in the EU it's gone
- the price of everything will slowly rise, because everything we use rely on gas one way or another, they've been sanctioned for 50 years they don't give a shit anymore.
- the US showing their complete lack of strategical vision, saying something on monday, the opposite on tuesday and denying they even said either things by wednesday
Building a rocket shell is probably just fine: you need to fuel yet - that you can't 3D print. probably fine...
Overall 3d printing is a lot more than ghost guns and ghost rockets. That the conversation dominates this small sub-section reeks of 'think-of-the-children' screeching that hides explicit power grabs in regulation and surveillance with the main intent seemingly to be 'enforce copywrite' (of only the big players that can afford to throw their weight around).
Fear pushes people's buttons.
i find these projects both fascinating and terrifying. seeing a single person building what normally involves huge defense corporations and government contracts, these things in their bedroom is amazing. it shows how information wants to be free and how ingenious people can get with whatever motivates them.
The submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47425297 "Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts" - https://github.com/novatic14/MANPADS-System-Launcher-and-Roc...
Seems to have almost as many comments as points, so guessing it got pushed down the frontpage list because of the "anti-flame-war" thingy HN has.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47385935
Is there a parts list?
Model rocketry, as a hobby, enjoys a limited amount of regulation, at least in the US. In large part, that is because the community has been very good about self-policing. Most folks who are serious about the hobby closely follow the safety guidelines published by the two national organizations (Tripoli and NAR), and steer newcomers to as well. Serious accidents are few and far between, intentional damage even more so. Compare this to, say, drones, which seem to be more widely embraced by the public, but are much more closely regulated and have been implicated in a number of serious incidents like https://abcnews.com/US/drone-operator-charged-hitting-super-... . Model and amateur rockets are cool. Folks mis-using them are going to run into a lot of pushback from pretty much every direction, because it'd only take an incident or two to ruin the hobby for everyone.
to relate to OpenRocket, some people are into rocket powered gliders and use autopilots to make flying them after launch easier. It's basically a fly by wire setup so controlling the glider is on easy-mode with the autopilot doing most of the work keeping things stable while the human with the controller just focuses on making the slow circles back to the launch area. These autopilots are how typical quadcopter drones can be flown easily without the wind and 4 motors causing havoc constantly.