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Krazed III

crazed 3

Krazed III was created when Crazed II had an unfortunate recovery problem, and hit the ground at just over 200mph. As a result the airframe was completely totaled, so a complete rebuild was in order. To make the best of this, a slimmer and more lightweight design was created, which was essentially a 36" long 54mm motor mount tube with a CPR recovery system stacked on top of it. The extremely long motor mount tube was to allow the rocket to fly on the various hybrid motors we have, and allowed for some very large APCP motors to be flown. However, because the rocket was so light, flying anything much larger than a J motor could put the flight well into supersonic speeds and high impulse motors could push over 50G of acceleration, so to cope with this a completely fiberglass airframe was constructed.

For more information about the build, see its post on rocketryforum.com

Unfortunately, the life of Krazed III was quite short, only 4 flights.

You can get all of the data in an excel worksheet in a zip file here

Flight A on 10-13-07:
(note that the acceleration graph is reading in .01G increments) This is the first flight using the rev3 GPS tracker, which was 100% successful.
10-13-07a altitude
10-13-07a acceleration

Flight B on 10-13-07:
On this flight the main chute did not deploy properly, so the rocket came down at about 50mph. The damaged the airframe, and the GPS tracker. The airframe was rebuilt, however the GPS tracker was never quite the same.
10-13-07b altitude
10-13-07b acceleration

Flight A on 4-6-08:
On this flight the rocket worked flawlessly, however the GPS tracker had trouble and I did not get any telemetry data.

Flight B on 4-6-08:
This flight I did get some telemetry data, however the data stopped coming in at apogee, and I did not have any location fix on the rocket after that. Coincidentally, we also lost sight of the rocket during its flight, and sadly never could find it.
4-6-08 altitude
4-6-08 acceleration
The current top theory is that through some fluke in the motor design we got a huge increase in thrust at about 4500ftAGL which sent Krazed III into orbit, and it is peacefully rocketing around somewhere in space. Thus was born Krazed IV, yet another scratch rebuild.

Update! We found the rocket after it sat in the desert for over 5 years. The motor was recoverable, but the electronics had mostly turned to dust due to the impact followed by 5 years of blowing sand.

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