Back In The Saddle

Well, its been exactly a month since the last post, and a lot has been going on. Also, that's the official reason for the moratorium on blogging recently. It also has a lot to do (unofficially) with me being lazy. But we all knew that.

I'm going to skip a long recap about the last month, but I will type some highlights. Saw TMNT, which was really good. Not great, but good. I got a free Central BBQ t-shirt in celebration of their 5th anniversary. Easter was good, but long (+450 miles in one day). CBU performed very well at the Moonbuggy Race in Huntsville, even though they had no seniors. I saw Hank Pitts while I was down there. He's good, by the way. Also, I think I went to class quite a bit.

My time lately has been dominated by my Tactical Missile Design project (codename: Hound Dog). Its been really fun, but inspired a lot of headaches. The propellant grains were giving me a lot of trouble, and converging to a solution slowed everything else down. I was originally going to try and slide by without fins, but it turned out that I need them. Anyway, what you see to the right is the finished product (pretty much) as I have it drawn in Pro/Engineer. The yellow nose is actually the front half of the Small Diameter Bomb (SDB), a bunker-busting "terrorist killer" that can currently be dropped off of an F-15 or an F-22. My missile can lob it 500 miles (150 miles past the design point) in some directions. Anyway, my final presentation was Monday, and went fairly well. Dr. Flandro had some points (good ones) that I need to explore and possibly revise, but nothing that will ruin my design. There's only one thing that really bugs me, which is my second stage propellant. I'm using a unique geometry that industry experts might call "ridiculous" (or "unwise" if they want to be nice about it). Bottom line is that I got backed into a corner with a constant thrust profile, and there isn't much I can do about it now. The plan now is to spend Thursday night through Saturday evening getting it done so I can worry about my other two classes next week.

Tomorrow's my last day of class for the semester, which is pretty unbelievable. At least I don't have Missile Design tomorrow. That'll give me time to look over my Viscous sample tests once more before class. Boundary-layer flow is a little weird. And its getting late, so I'm going to wrap this up now.

It's good to be back.