Medium Power Supersonic Rocket Design

I made a Medium Power Supersonic Rocket design. This PDF attached here is the project report, detailing it

1. Openrocket
2. Autodesk Inventor

In model rocketry, there are 3 main levels of rockets: low power, medium power and high power. Low power is well, the lowest power, with motors ranging from A to E. The power of the motor doubles per letter, so in simple terms 2 * A motor = B motor. These motors are not very dangerous to work with and don't require any certification or license to build. The rockets are mainly built from cardboard and balsa wood.

High power is where things start getting serious. These motors range from H to O. Construction techniques change drastically. Instead of cardboard and wood, now we have fiberglass and metal. There are 3 levels of certification, L1 (H and I motors), L2 (J, K and L motors) and L3 (M, N and O motors). These rockets typically go SUPERSONIC and are usually very hard to build.

Medium power is like the bridge between Low Power and High Power. It consists of rockets made from F and G motors. Some of these rockets are made from fiberglass and plywood, while some are made from cardboard and balsa wood. These rockets can go SUPERSONIC if they are heavily optimized.

DISCLAMER: The rocket outlined in this build is not to be built without at least some build experience with rockets. I don't consider myself to be able to build this, at least not at this point in time. This is just a design I cooked up.

The first step in designing this rocket is to model it in Openrocket, a free opensource simulation software for rockets. It took a lot of trial and error to get to the point where it could go supersonic. All the parts can be seen in this image of my simulation.

The next image is a data table showing all the motors can be used for this rocket. It also shows multiple data points like apogee, flight time, landing velocity, velocity off the rod etc. As you can see, only the most powerful motor, the G75J-10 can make the rocket reach SUPERSONIC speeds.

The only rule for this project was that this rocket should go SUPERSONIC without needing any of the high power certifications. I don't know if this design would actually work in real life, since I don't have the skill to build it right now. However, I can get a bit closer by making a CAD model of it.

The next step is to make a CAD model of the rocket. This will allow us to visualize what the rocket will look like when assembled.

This animation shows the main parts of the rocket all being assembled, and the drawing PDF shows how the rocket will look like when it is assembled.