Hedonic Treadmill is a family of launch vehicles designed to work together.
(It is also a way of describing how our life expectations change with our circumstances to normalize how we feel about our accomplishments—sound familiar?)
The launch vehicles and their missions will:
- Provide opportunities for the deliberate practice of required skills
- Design, test, and refine critical systems to improve their reliability and resiliency
Design Philosophy
This family of rockets have a cohesive design philosophy and, where applicable, interchangeable parts.
Launch Vehicles
Guidelines
- The rocket design cannot be based off:
- Past or present hobby rocket kits (no clones or upscaled/downscaled)
- Past, present, or future sounding rockets, missiles, or other launch vehicles
- The rocket design will be tailored for its missions
- Arnor will be designed for
- Subsonic speeds
- G-I motors
- Single & dual deployment configurations
- Testing avionics payloads
- Avionics designed for reliability employing both redundancy & diversity
- Narsil will be designed for
- Transonic speeds
- J-M motors
- Dual deployment
- Testing L3-rated recovery systems and construction techniques
- Elendil will be designed for
- Supersonic speeds
- K-N motors
- Dual deployment
This is the basic roadmap, but it will necessarily change as I progress through different stages of the project.
Construction Techniques
Since I will be using a G12 filament-wound airframe for my level 3 project, I will also use it for my level 1 and level 2 projects to gain more experience with the material.
G12 Fibreglass Airframes
I chose less-common airframe diameters—2.6", 4.5", 5.5"—and the only suppliers that carry all three of them are MadCow Rocketry & Composite Warehouse:
G12 Fiberglass Tubes
Standard Tubing
G12 Airframes