I'm just thankful on this Thanksgiving day as I try to live here in the USA that my HN social score (Karma I think they call it here, funny, sounds like reddit) is not yet used to limit my boarding of high-speed rail or getting a loan or even a mortgage.
What I find interesting about this is that in the RC and drone building and flying community, you have generally two categories of aircraft:
a) Aircraft that are designed to be a faithful scale model of a real thing, with all of the intricate modeling and painting work that goes into it. For example there's a person who built a model of an Antonov 225: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRI2y0cwHd0
You can find flying B-29 models, jet airliner models, etc.
and then
b) Aircraft that are designed for a dedicated purpose and look nothing like anything that exists in the 1:1 scale aviation world, such as the "Believer" foam first-person-video plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf4x5XhHvD4
where (b) includes other clean sheet of paper designs like Zipline's blood bank delivery drone, which has a recovery method not dissimilar to a Boeing/Insitu ScanEagle:
I really enjoyed the "cinematography" that went into this -- made it extra special. The little boop comment in the middle of a very crucial detachment made me laugh pretty hard. Well done!
Someone once told me you're not supposed to make rockets with guidance control (in the US) because they are then missiles. Is that true? Is this guy in the US?
His flight systems are all attitude control, not guidance to a target. It’s a silly distinction but apparently makes things OK. He’s talked with state dept people a lot to be able to sell his kits internationally.
>> His flight systems are all attitude control, not guidance to a target. It’s a silly distinction but apparently makes things OK.
I'm not sure how thrust vectoring is altitude control... I suppose it's OK to steer then so long as your "target" is the general direction up. I can see value in that.
The footage is hugely slowed down, hence the deep pitch of the rocket motor sounds (they are usually very 'hissy' at this size), and the slow speed of the sparks coming from the motors. Also if you listen closely when the rocket is descending and deploying parachutes you can hear the greatly-slowed-down sound of a DSLR shutter actuating repeatedly (ka-thunk-beep) as photos are taken of the descent.
To avoid disturbing others in the same room, I watched this at first with sound entirely off. Watching it again with the benefit of sound it's blindingly obvious that this is slowed down significantly... Facepalm time.
There's a little more info on his site (with some index finger scrolling fatigue): https://bps.space/falcon-heavy