The Range Head

by Jack Hagerty, LUNAR #002

Hi folks. Sorry it's been so long since we last "talked" but it's been a really busy summer. A club contingent braved the southern desert in July to attend the National Meet in Arizona and the board held a meeting to catch up on business. Here's the fallout from those events, in no particular order.

NIGHT LAUNCH

Our first night launch last June was a big success. Lots of people showed up and I had people tell me, in person, by phone, notes and e-mail what a good time they had. Most of them, including some spectators, wanted to know when we were going to do it again. Now that the board's had a chance to talk it over some, the answer is October. We've decided to set two launches per year as night launches, at least for this year and next, to see if the initial enthusiasm holds up.

Based on our experience in June, we are fine tuning things a little bit. Here are the changes and/or additions made from last time.

1. Lights - As before, all rockets launched after dusk have to have lights on them to aid with recovery. A new wrinkle is that the lights have to be visible not only during recovery, but during boost and coast as well (well, at least during coast; boost is a little redundant!). This means that you can't just snap some lights onto your shock cord and wait for ejection to see it. The reason is that we had a few lawn darts last time, and we *have* to be able to see the vehicle during the entire flight, not just during boost and recovery.

   Also, the amount of light emitted by your lighting system will be evaluated by the RSO during inspection. Last time we let just about anything fly, and some of the (admittedly small) rockets had some pretty marginal lights. One minimalist flew a mosquito with a single tiny LED out of a toy. We couldn't even see it on the pad! We want to be able to see it easily at several hundred feet in case it's streamlining in.

2. Time - The only thing wrong with last June's launch is that it was held right on the solstice, the latest sunset of the year. This lead to a complaint by one of the residents of the condo complex to the north. We want to be able to be completely finished and packed up by 10 p.m. An October launch gives us this opportunity since the sunset is more than an hour earlier than in mid June. We will start setting up the equipment at 4 p.m. and shoot for a first flight by 5 or before. This will give nearly two hours of flying before we have to impose "night rules." After another couple hours we'll call a stop and start cleaning up. That brings us to ...

3. Help - The biggest lesson learned last time was how much more difficult it is to break down and pack up our equipment in the dark. The board authorized the purchase of some fluorescent lanterns for the sign-in table, RSO and "Pad Mothers" to use, but what we really need is help, more than on a normal launch. Since the launch starts in the late afternoon, there is a huge crush of people already there and ready to go when we open the gates which puts a big strain on the sign-in people. When taking the equipment down last time, lots of small parts were lost in the dark meaning that Warren Massey had to come back and search the grounds the next day. Remember that you get a "Gold Card" for any field job which lets you go straight to the front of the line, so give us a hand!

RANGE BOX THEFT

Before getting onto the fun stuff, I've got to mention that at the July launch we had a member report the theft of some reloadable motor components. While we like to think that people in our hobby are all honest and trustworthy, apparently that's not the case. Please take reasonable precautions with your range boxes and equipment if you have to leave them unattended.

NARAM

LUNAR put in a good showing at NARAM 39. The Contest Director, Steve Lubliner, remarked that LUNAR had the best attendance of any California club. In addition to myself and my son, Liam, members Larry Shenosky, his daughter Barbara and son David, and Paul Magid attended. Larry and Paul's wives also came along. While I was there mostly for administrative purposes and to push for acceptance of a new scale category (Future/Fiction Scale), the Shenosky's took home some serious metal, pulling down more than a dozen trophies and special awards in A and C divisions. Congratulations to all!

See the next two items for some more fallout from NARAM.

CONTESTS

While LUNAR did pretty well at NARAM, it was do completely to the single handed (well, triple handed) efforts of the Shenosky family. Larry and I had some discussions afterward and think that we could do a lot better if we had more people participating. Early on, LUNAR held a couple of NAR sanctioned contests per year and they were well attended by a good cross section of competitors. The reason we stopped is the reason for almost everything in this club, lack of volunteers. In this case for lack of a Contest Director. Being CD is not hard, but it does take some involvement and it's really hard to compete while also running the contest (which is why even though we have lots of members interested in competing, we don't have any who want to run the contests).

Larry said he'd be willing to help coordinate a LUNAR competition effort, not necessarily be CD all the time, but direct our contests to give us a better shot at some national titles. (I should mention that Larry was a national level competitor for years back east before moving to California.) I'll help out too, but we need to know how many members are interested in competing in contests. That will be one of the agenda items at the meeting. What meeting, you ask? That leads us to our next item.

MEETING

When attending the "section advisors" meeting at NARAM with the other club presidents I was proud of the fact that our club is one of the better ones in the nation when it comes to both total active members (we have nearly 200, which is two to four times the size of most NAR sections) and especially youth membership. Most of the other clubs complained that they had a difficult time recruiting "A" and "B" division members (under 12 years and 12 to 17 respectively). Our involvement with local schools and youth groups means that this class of member just falls into our lap. However, the one area where I was quite sheepish concerns monthly meetings. We don't have any.

We held monthly meetings from the very beginning up until the end of '95. While we always intended to have a short business meeting up front and spend the bulk of the evening on some educational presentation or build session, what wound up happening was we'd get into long discussions and have to cut the educational part short, or even cut it out if there was no one to present anything. This lead to a decaying spiral where it eventually wound up with the same five or six guys every month talking about the same things. We decided to forgo monthly meetings and only have one for "special presentations." This worked OK at first as in the first half of '96 we had Mark Jeghers talk about his Mach 2 altimeter flights and Royce Longacre give an excellent presentation on finishing techniques. But since then, nada.

I want to get periodic meetings started again. Probably not monthly, but maybe bimonthly and certainly at least quarterly. To help me I've got new member Andrew Pohlman who's agreed to take on the role as Educational Chairman. Andrew will help coordinate the presentations, which will mostly be made by others, just to keep it interesting, and will be targeted towards the younger members.

Just to get us jump started again, I'm calling a meeting for our traditional time, the third Thursday of the month at 7 p.m. Since it's too late for September, we'll make it next month, October 16. If we can reserve it with the Livermore PD, we'll have it in the public meeting room of the Police building where we held the last year's worth of meetings. This date and place is only cast in jell-o at the moment, so keep an eye out for an updated time and place.

The main agenda will be the things that resulted from my trip to NARAM, some of which I've touched on above. I'll also have all of my slides from the trip which should hopefully be interesting. I also want to discuss the periodic meetings and our contest schedule.

NEWSLETTER

One last thing. Editor Lynn Kissel has done a masterful job the past three years with the 'Clips. He has taken it from a crude, spasmodic few issues cranked out by Mark Weiss and me to a consistent, stylish newsletter with photos and even an electronic version for those of you on the Web. The 'Clips is published on an irregular schedule, approximately quarterly, but I'd like to take it to being a regular bimonthly (i.e., a Jan/Feb issue, Mar/Apr, May/Jun, etc.). Unfortunately, Lynn's work schedule doesn't allow this sort of commitment. While we all get busy at work, when Lynn gets busy he winds up in Moscow, Pittsburgh or Brazil for weeks at a time!

I'd like someone to volunteer to be an assistant editor that could pick up the slack for a few months to get us rolling on a regular schedule (so that, say, Nov/Dec could be our first regular scheduled issue) and then take over early next year. You could work out with Lynn whether on not he'd continue with the electronic version on his own. And for all the rest of you, remember, the editor doesn't *write* the newsletter, he only assembles it. I think that every single one of you has a good newsletter article in him, if only a tech tip, or a funny story, or a new way of holding fins in alignment while the glue dries. Write it up, send it in and have the thrill of seeing your own words in print!

Information date: September 14, 1997 lk