Tag Archives: featured

Odd’l Sputnik

Posted on by tjkopena

Odd’l Rockets makes a cute little kit called Sputnik that’s real fast to build, flies well & easy, and is just a lot of fun. It’s a classic design of four dowels or bamboo skewers glued into a styrofoam ball with an insulating tube into which the motor is shoved.

Kit face card.

Typically these rockets are flown with no or minimal finishing. Most spray paints dissolve this kind of foam, so it takes some extra effort to paint, and flying au naturale keeps the weight very minimal. Building one recently though, I really wanted an actual Sputnik-lookalike smooth, shiny, metallic finish. Here’s what I wound up with:

Ta-da!

Not completely perfect, but I ran out of time, and it was getting heavy anyway. The deal here is that the ball is low density styrofoam that’s not smooth, at all.

(manufacturer photo)

Getting the look I wanted took a little finishing work:

  1. Coat of Modg-Podg and sand
  2. Coat of carpenter’s wood filler and sand
  3. Coat of carpenter’s wood filler and sand
  4. Filler primer spray and sand
  5. Filler primer spray and sand
  6. Black primer spray
  7. Black primer spray
  8. Metallic chrome spray
  9. Metallic chrome spray

That came out well, but the tradeoff is that the model’s a good bit heavier. It flies up well but doesn’t go as high and lands harder. In its usual unfinished state the design’s featherlight and simply falls down body-first (protecting the legs) and bounces. It might even still be going upward when the ejection charge goes off, giving the rocket an extra boost. The weight of my build means it’s decidedly arced over, coming down comparatively fast, and near the ground already when the ejection charge goes off, hurling it downward even harder. After two flights a notable crack formed in the shell. Still flyable, easily fixable with white glue, and not surprising, but definitely a price paid for aesthetics! In the future I’ll think ahead and order some plugged motors without ejection charges, eliminating that additional impact push.

In any event, despite not being as robust as I might hope, I really like the look of the rocket, it flies well, and was a crowd pleaser at this weekend’s club launch.

 

Rainbow Bobby

Posted on by tjkopena

Alice’s Rainbow Bobby, a very alternative take on Launch Lab Rocketry’s Bullet Bobby:

Rainbow Bobby is just suuuper super super excited to fly! Yeah yeah yeah!

PARA’s Jim H gave Alice this kit at January’s launch. It’s labeled as a Level 2 build but I think it’s a good kit for beginners. There’s almost no knife work (the fins come completely cut out) and you can produce a good result without sanding, sealing, or papering. Alice built the whole thing herself with minimal guidance.

Carefully measuring & marking where the fins will attach.

Assembling the motor mount.

One last check right before bedtime that the fins are still drying in place.

Gluing in the motor mount.

I did wind up doing most of the spray painting as the cans are too big for Alice’s hands to make the rainbow she wanted in such a small length. Even I had to talk her into dropping a couple colors. But I did follow strict specifications and supervision to achieve her intensely deliberated paint scheme. There was even a household vote on candidate designs. I admit I was skeptical at first of the stickers layout she came up with, but the rocket turned out very characterful and wonderful.

Very serious studies went into the paint scheme, including a household vote on a slate of sketches as well as computer aided visualization, all to wind up with… a rainbow! Surprise! I WOULD HAVE NEVER GUESSED.

Alice evaluating whether she wants to simplify the paint scheme to make it more feasible for her to paint, or take a gamble on trusting dad to execute her vision… Decisions, decisions…

Checking her notes before the all-important stickering phase.

The debut launch was… dramatic. The launch lug somehow bound on the rod and took it for a ride as the rocket looped hard into the ground right in front of us. After some field repairs to re-attach fins, launch lug, new parachute, etc., the second flight went up well but again lost a fin on landing, ending flights for the day. At this point Rainbow Bobby’s had fins ripped off on 3 out of 4 flights. Part of it is that the official motor recommendations are a bit underpowered and the delay too long for how much nose ballast is mandated by the instructions—it comes down hard. Compounding that, many launches this year have featured rock hard frozen ground, wrecking numerous rockets on landings that might be fine in summer.

To some extent I think the kit should have been designed with through-the-wall fins given how little attachment they have to the body and how far below it they hang. One tweak to the kit as-is that I’ve applied in our repairs is to drill holes in the body tube where the fins attach, to allow glue plugs to form inside. However, it’s a tradeoff; reinforcing inside the tube makes it harder to replace fins if/when they break rather than tear off. Another thought is that the ballast might be too much. It makes sense, but intuitively seems like a lot when you actually hold the rocket. Perhaps the design doesn’t account for the effect of base drag from the low fineness ratio (its stubbyness)?

Waiting for Bobby’s first flight!

Recovering our OTHER rainbow rocket, a stand-in for the less successful Bobby recoveries.

Sleeping off a big day and a couple disappointments on the way home (we also lost our Tall One super-roc to a tree).

But, this past weekend the ground was soft and it just happened that both of the cars next to us had their own Bullet Bobbies! So of course we had a Bullet Bobby Blast-Off, from which all rockets were recovered undamaged.

The lineup for the Bullet Bobby Blast-Off.

 

Arcane (Season 1)

Posted on by tjkopena

Unrequested TV recommendation: Netflix’s Arcane is exceptional.

Basically all I know about League of Legends, the videogame in which Arcane is set, is that it’s a 5×5 battle arena game derived from a fan-made map for Warcraft III, extremely popular and lucrative, and widely considered toxic. Players are toxic, some content is toxic, the developer is toxic. Riot Games recently settled a sexual harassment & gender discrimination class action suit for $100 million.

Arcane transcends all of that. It’s not just the best screen adaptation of a videogame ever made. It’s so far beyond any other as to render that discussion entirely uninteresting. The show stands all on its own and the first season at least seems likely to settle in as one of the best series I have ever watched, period.

First off, the animation is gorgeous. The main aesthetic is a detailed painterly style that slides back and forth between a sunny, clean utopia and a dank, dirty underworld. Both feel fully realized and teem with life and visual interest. From time to time that’s punctuated by short segments in a totally different, abstract style, projecting a possible future, a fear, or a mental breakdown. Fight scenes are strobing and wild, but the action easily followed. Closeups yield real faces with detail and emotion. And in an era in which it often feels like films are competing to be the visually darkest and most inscrutable, Arcane is suffuse with color, from the bright blue skies topside to the slashes of neon graffiti and hair down below. It’s all art-book quality but in motion.

A tale of a society starkly and tensely divided between haves & have-nots, and the interplay of technology and personal feelings in that struggle, the surface plot is fine enough. The gradual reveal of the world and its people is also a naturally compelling mystery to hook you in. But the characters and their relationships make the show.

Arcane’s first season is a robust, deep story in which viewers could focus on a number of different aspects. I say the core is one thread about sisters and another brothers, tied together by a major theme of fathers and daughters. All of that lies within a tragedy of misunderstandings, bad timing, circumstances, and emotions. There’s at least one killer line in the fathers & daughters theme that is worth the watching all alone. In classic fashion it’s totally misunderstood by an eavesdropper, sending their arc careening downhill. You could hold a whole segment of a literature course breaking down the character foils, textual echoes, symbology, and formal structure.

Stunningly for its origins, the show is also notably, cringelessly diverse & inclusive. It just is, through and through, and doesn’t make a big deal about it. A striking variety of ethnicities, cultures, and accents appear, even just among the humans. One major character has a physical disability. Alongside the familial relationships and a believable, natural bromance central to the story, Arcane also portrays primary characters in a budding romance that feels organic and sweet while being quietly, matter-of-factly gay. Their relationship is treated more empathetically and wholly than queer relationships in many many games and shows, it’s not simply a token couple or statement.

Arcane is furthermore replete with female characters at every level of the story and its world, many of them leaders and/or fighters. The primary ones are all well developed and have their own backgrounds, agency, and progression. But I found very telling the presentation of minor character Ambessa Medarda. In real-world terms she’s a somewhat Roman-styled imperial warlord of African ethnicity, come to reconnect with her estranged daughter, make an arms deal… and unabashedly hook up with devoted men. Notably, she looks the part. Neither a waif nor a brick as she might be in many animes, videogames, etc., Ambessa Medarda is distinctively portrayed visually as what she is: An incredibly fit and physically strong lifelong warrior, who’s also very attractive and sexual. By and large the female characters are all drawn with proportions and features that are reasonably realistic, especially within the context of a ridiculous animated sci-fi show, but most importantly not in an exploitive or objectified fashion.

To be clear, the show is unfortunately not going to be appreciated by everyone. Ultimately it’s a steampunk fantasy/sci-fi videogame universe, by the end of which people are flying around on hoverboards, fighting with technomagical power fists, teleporting around the world on airships, and so on. If you think about it too hard, the technology level of the world is nonsensically inconsistent. Scenes are often visually fast and pulsing; every episode carries a trigger warning about flashing lights. The soundtrack, mostly recognizable modern pop, really works for a couple characters and scenes, but can be distracting and will not be to everyone’s liking.

However, anybody who can appreciate at all its kind of universe and artistic style will likely enjoy the series. If it were a graphic novel it would be a classic to revisit again and again over time, pouring over the art and relationships. Arcane is a masterpiece.