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Newsgroups: rec.models.rockets
Subject: NARAM-39 report (sorry it's so late...)
From: kaplow_r@eisner.decus.org (Bob Kaplow)
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 17:21:30 GMT

The sport launch:

Lots of sport rockets were flown on Saturday and Sunday, with the volume
tapering off during the rest of the week. Unfortunately, my footlocker
wouldn't hold any big models, so I could only bring my small to medium
stuff, a few super scaleup kits, and of course the silly stuff. The Alway
brothers stopped off to tour "Bob's Hobby Shop" on their way to NARAM, and
convinced me I had to convert my Wylie Coyote container for the launch. I
just got it done in time, and flew it Saturday. As expected with an Acme
product, it crashed, right into Mark Johnson's van. First time I've ever
nominated myself for "Best Midwest Flight". I seem to have a thing for
trustees named "Mark". Later in the week, Mar's van had a target on the
window.

The Happy Meal made its annual appearance, along with an Intruder backyard
roc that had been converted to D12 power. I flew the whiffle ball and bat,
and the small end of the Skywriter series. The Bulls Space Probe made an
appearance in Suns territory, making the slam dunk and landing upright on
its feet! The Oberweis sundae lid, originally inspired by Tucson's own Tad
Morgan made several flights to dispose of extra 13mm motors. The Super
Ranger flew fine on D12 power, and my 3x Sprite zoomed into the sky on a D13
reload. My Maxi Streak suffered a nasty prang when the E11 blew its aft
closure about a second into the burn. Twice the Great Pumpkin rose out of
the sport range, bringing D12s to all the good little boys and girls (and
bringing E15s to all the bad boys and girls). Ayatollah Potato Head made
another NARAM appearance. Biosphere made two nice flights, with the addition
of a cactus and some native dirt for the cactus scale event. Alas I was beat
by Tucson native Ed Bertchy and his rocket eating cactus.

The competition:

It was not a good meet for All The President's Men. We DQed out of every
event we flew except the glider events on Wednesday. Monday saw me have two
Rotacrocks fail to burn the elastic burn string, and Ric seperate and lose
his stupidroc.

Tuesday was altitude day. Both C Cl Alt and E DEL called out for motors with
longer delays. The E15-7 delay is too short for a good egglofter, and the
C6-7 is similarly too short for the cluster altitude event. While I expected
many novel solutions to this problem, everyone seemed to just live with
them. Perhaps that influenced the DQ rate in both events.

We had no C Cluster Altitude model (just as well, as this was THE event for
prangs). Other designs varied wildly, and had MANY problems. The two most
novel were the top two in C division. Chad Ring had a shotgun BT-20 model
with 2 extra motor pods on the bottom, and two more at the top. 6 C10s were
all ground started, and to everyones surprise, it worked great. But he was
beat out by Wally Etzel (sp?) who used 3 C6-7s and 3 C5-3s nicely fared in a
triangle clustered model that was the slickest built of any model I saw. It
soared to 716 meters.

My E Dual Egglofter soared on an E6 to the highest flight of the meet, 712
meters, but damaged its chute, and scrambled both eggs. Prior to te meet,
there was much concern about using E6s in DEL, but that flight showed that
it can be done (at least if I can solve the recovery problem...) I wasn't
the only one to break some egg: of about 10 dozen eggs on hand to start the
day, there were less than a dozen survivors. There was only one qualified
flight in team division, and in B division, only one flight points awarded
to the only surviving egg which had a track lost. Trip Barber as usual had
the best flight at 650 meters.

Wednesday our luck changed. Bunny made two good A RG flights on a Nymph,
finishing third, only one second behind the Southern Neutron team. I made
two good flights with my NARAM-30 leftover Gold Rush D BG, and then on the
third flight nailed a thermal and it vanished to the west. I saw it for
about 8 minutes before it vanished, and got a MAX. That left me in second,
well ahead of most, but almost a minute behind the S-N team flying RC in the
event. Alex Seltskis of London turned in the best performance overall in C
division D BG. Nobody scored more than one MAX.

Wednesday afternoon we headed over to the Air Force Titan museum to see the
neat hardware left behind by the cold war. As we were leaving we saw Trip
Barber entering, obviously on a covert spy mission for the NAVY.

Thursday Ric got a DQ and two CATOs in SD, as the 1/2A2-6 motors had either
very short or very long delays. 

Thursday afternoon we were treated to a bus tour of the Air Force
"boneyard", with row after row of aircraft in storage. We saw a bunch of
D-21 drones that were part of the SR-71 program, hundreds of B52s being
chopped up, and literally thousands of other planes in hot storage.

There were several interesting R&D reports including an A division entry on
tube fin stability, Trip Barber's investigation of MRLOW as a safety
criteria, Peter Alway's "Rockets of the World", Ducky Klousers further
analysis of streamers, Larry Shenowski's work with TV video for data
collection, and two great team reports from MARS, Phobos&Diemos 32 pad
launch system, and International Rescues mathematical analysis of thrust
time curves, which showed that curves could be reduced down to 7 numbers,
total impulse, burn time, and 5 eigenvalues that represent the shape of the
curve. This report has great potential for simplifying motor data files for
programs like RASP.

The most depressing day was probably Friday as the three best scale models
of the meet all pranged. Bunny's Atlas augered straight in when he forgot to
put the ejection charge on the reload, John Pursley's huge Saturn V was
grossly under powered, and arched over and impacted about a second before
the G42-4 ejected, and Bruce Markeleski TWICE pranged his Lunar Module that
won last year. 

That left Team division for (you guessed it) the S-N team flying an RC Bell
X-1. This model caused a great deal of contraversy, as it was launched at a
safety code violating 45 degree angle. As LCO at the time, I chose to walk
away from the range head rather than push the button. There was discussion
of a change to the safety code allowing RC models to launch at the 45 degree
angle, but until it's aproved and in place for all, it shouldn't be allowed.

Pierre Miller collected the only other NIRA places with a 4th place in HD,
and a 2nd in Scale with a very nice Mercury Atlas. If the Mercury capsule
had been better, he might have had a first. There's always next year. Tom
Pastrick and Adam Elliott flew the meet for NIRA, but took no places.

The best news for NIRA came at the banquet, where "The Leading Edge" was for
the second straight year named the best section newsletter. Cudos to Bob
Wiersbe and everyone else who helped out the past year. Now we've got to lug
the thing around another year. NOVAAR again won the section championship,
while NARHAMS won the best section award.

The Prangs:

Aside from Wylie Coyote and the Scale models, prangs were dominated by
Cluster Altitude models. Many went unstable. Some thrashed in the range
area, attacking various RSOs and ensuring nominations. Peter Alway chose to
attack the Launch Crue tent, earning an honorary NOVARR membership. Both
Trip Barber and Jon Rains flew conical models that augered in, Trip barely
splitting the difference between the shelter and the parked cars. But Bruce
Markeleski did it again, tipping off the pad, and going cruise missile right
at the sport range. He took out a V2 that was sitting on the pad waiting to
fly. I've never seen that happen before! His two scale prangs also earned
nominations. Bruce became the first back to back winner of the prang award,
which was composed of about 50 used C6-7s, plus the usual wreckage collected
during the week.

Manufacturers news in reverse alphabetical order this year:

Vector Aero: Kevin McKiou displayed his latest 'Cuda S8E kit, retailing at
$99.

Totally Tubular: Jim Fackert has added BT-52 (29mm MMT) and BT-55 to the
line.

Saturn Press: Peter Alway had nothing new, but showed a work in progress on
fantasy ships being written by Jack Hagerty, which should be out by
NARAM-40.

Quest: Bill Stine showed new RTF kits, and an Area 51 UFO that should be out
next spring. Also new is a launcher that uses a single 9V battery.

NARTS: Not a manufacturer, but NARTS was displaying it's wares in Bills
Plumbing and Aerospace room all week, and taking orders.

Eclipse: Todd Schneider is planning a line of kits, plus transition sections
in the future.

Cosmodrome: Mike Kruger has a line of mid to high power scale kits. His Nike
Smoke was seen on the power line at the field entrance most of the week.

Apogee: Tim van Milligan announced a composite D10 (18mm) to be adeded to
the motor line, along with a micro V2 and an SR-71 like kit coming soon.
Resin cast transitions add to the newly introduced helicopter hinges that
were popular in 1/4A HD this year.

Aerotech: Ed LaCroix talked about Econojets, HPR recertification, some very
high thrust 38mm reloads, and finally a 2 lead ignitor. He also apologized
for still not having all the current shipping product certified.

ASP: Andy Jackson had a room full of kits and supplies, including a new line
of competition kits.

Atomic Hobbies of Phoenix and others did buisness from the field parking lot
on the weekend.

Before the manufacturers forum, the NAR auction raised over a thousand
dollars for the Bob Cannon memorial fund. I got some D13s still in their
green tubes.

The politics:

Election: Only two candidates ran for 3 offices: Pat Miller and Trip Barber
were reelected. Vern Estes resigned since no candidate was elected to
replace him, leaving the mountain region vacant. Steve Lubliner was
appointed to fill the vacancy after surviving as CD of NARAM-39.

BATF: NAR policy suddenly changed at NARAM from "don't ask don't tell" to
being the enforcement arm of the BATF. Trip insisted on participants signing
a letter of compliance. He and others signed forms agreeing to comply with
all applicable federal, state, and local regulations. Later in the week,
when I asked, he had no idea what the state and local regulations for Tucson
were!

The NAR is still waiting for the promised letter from the BATF detailing the
attached garage exemption for model rocket motors. Bunny presented us with a
timetable for NAR action that won't guarantee that we have this letter by
the end of the year, which seemed insufficient to me. I guess it's up to
those of us who need storage to carry this ball.

As a result of the Valuejet crash, air shipment of reloads is no longer
possible. That means slow land shipment by mail, or pay thru the nose for
FedEx.

Mfgr demo policy: After the last flight of NARAM-38, the NAR has tightened
the demo policy. A manufacture demo must have advance S&T approval, the
manufacturer must present a valid business license, get the NAR presidents
approval, and the RSO has final say over any demo.

S&T/mess data: will not be released as it is not statistically significant.
Having the MESS form on the web has roughly doubled the reporting rate,
which was around 85 last year. This year's total already exceeds that
number.

WEB/List server: Chris Tavares has done a great job as the NAR webmaster.
Bunny indicated that the NAR is investigating a listserver for the NAR and
for sections.

L3 certification: I think that the BoD now understands that it is
unreasonable to wait for the majority of HPR fliers to get L2 certification
before beginning to build an L3 process. The current numbers are 470 L1
certified members and 120 L2 certified members.

Pink Book: After yet another fubared revision cycle the contest board will
publish yet another FUBAREd pink book, plus correct all of the typos from
the 1995 revision. At the competitors forum, much was discussed, and the
conclusion is that the current NPRM process is fatally flawed. Tom Lyon was
chartered to develop a better revision process by the winter board meeting.

Other competition topics discussed were the just passed rule  which
eliminates DQs for self penalizing flights, but opens up a new loophole
allowing an Alpha to qualify in RG. Other issues included altimiters for
tracking, a new and much improved point award sheet (the old one was
designed for use with Jim Barrowman's 80 column card antique IBM 1130
computer system), provisional events, sport events such as craftsmanship,
fantasy scale, ultra scale kit, old time events, competition motors, and
getting more young folks involved.

The 1997 Pink Book will finally be comming to the NAR web site.

Furure events: Trip Barber announced that NARCON would again be held in
Champaign, IL on March 27-28 1998, and the NSL will be in Muncie on May
16-17 1998. No one has yet stepped forward to host NARAM-40. If you are
interested, contact Trip Barber ASAP.

The People:

The highlight of every NARAM is renewing old friendships and meeting new
folks. I had met some of our Tucson and Phoenix hosts in November 1995, when
a business trip took me to Phoenix the week before an SSS launch. It was
nice to see all of them again, and meet the rest of the group. They did a
great job running NARAM, and have a really nice site. Now if we could just
move NARAM to the winter! I got to meet a few more rmr folks as well.

Some old friends that have been absent lately showed up this year, including
John Langford, Bob Sanford, Sid Maxwell, and G Harry Stine himself. Tom
Beach and Joyce Guzik couldn't make most of the week, but arrived late
Thursday to liven things up. Alas as with many west coast NARAMS, many of
the east cost regulars weren't there this year.

	Bob Kaplow	NAR # 18L	TRA # "Abort, Retry, Fail?"