Thank you for the excellent insights! I've been busy and the weather has been terrible for the past few weeks but we finally got a chance to launch, and it went great - Perfectly straight up, even with the fins tilted!
It didn't spin nearly as much as expected for 2 degrees and it also went pretty high although I'm not sure what the reaction time of the servos is, since it turned mid-flight instead of starting out with the angle. We'll start it out at the angle for the actual test data launches, we were just verifying it worked for this one.
We switched to a fully 3d printed payload and fin can which offers us many benefits, like perfect consistency between rockets, a much stiffer body, and a much better fit between the fin can and the body tube. The servo mount is part of the tube instead of sliding in which makes it a lot more convenient and rigid. There is much less slop overall in the system, and its only ~20g heavier than before.
I put much larger avionics bay vent holes for the 3d-printed rocket and they worked out a lot better, the curve for altitude looks just like the sims, it doesn't have that really quick sharp part and then sharp turn like before, I think its much better.
Just checking, a 3d-printed rocket is TARC legal right? You can see how it looks in the video attached.'
Everything but the nose cone on top is 3d printed, each color indicates a different piece.
Stats for today:
Altitude (P-Nut altimeter): 912ft
Flight time (hand-timing): 41.6s
Rocket mass: 533g
Motor: F51-10NT
I'm still not sure if I should get rid of the fusion mode because I don't think simple integration will get a good estimate of the angle of the rocket, and that is required for a good estimate of the vertical acceleration. Do you think it will be fine? I will definitely start collecting gyro velocity data.
I'm thinking we will do a 0deg launch, a 3deg launch, and a 6deg launch next time to try to get an idea of the response of the rocket. Do you think these are good values to test or should we do a different range?