Drag Bakes, Retro Rockets, Shuttlecocks, Oh My!

shut·tle·cock (shŭt'l-kŏk')

n. A small rounded piece of cork or rubber with a conical crown of feathers or plastic, used in badminton. Also called bird, birdie.

I'll get to it in a minute.

Classes were up and down today. Mechanical Design was interesting. Dr. Dekken worked some problems that he didn't assign, but was helpful anyway. He was especially helpful regarding a problem that invovled a displaced load, acting on a beam through an attached bracket. Its one of those things that's hard to visualize without a solution manual. Good times, though.

In Missiles, Paul Gloyer started covering mission and device architecture. This was probably his first lecture that went anywhere, and I was impressed overall. We talked about propellants, stabilizers, and eventally, decelerators. There's a few options: drag brakes (also known as "slow down flaps"), retro rockets, and drag ribbons / parachutes, and "shuttlecocks." Gloyer owns a patent or two on the topic, and it's rather ingenious. Essentially, the missile unfolds into a giant badmitton birdie in order to slow down to a reasonable speed with a reasonable temperature at our target location. The only danger is that the enemy could up the arms race another notch and develop a gigantic raquet. THEN we're in trouble.

After lunch and resume printing, we had Inviscid. Before class, Dr. Vakili said he needed to talk to me about work stuff after class. Call it a guilty conscience, but he had me nervous the whole time. He went over some homework, and got into some non-dimensionalization stuff (blegh, but its too important to ignore). It turns out that the work discussion was fairly benign (just more work), but it put me off the rest of the day.

After a haircut, some grocery shopping, and procuring a belt, I'm all set for the job fair tomorrow. I hope I knock 'em dead. Except those CIA guys. They're probably trained to get through this stuff anyway.