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Old 10-12-2010, 05:27 PM
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Mark II Mark II is offline
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Here's a couple of thoughts:

1.) Although this is not shown in the diagram, I wonder if the wadding is supposed to go in front of the pod rather than along side of it, as the diagram shows. Packing a bit of wadding into the tube ahead of the motor pod might prevent the recess.

2.) [incorrect] I suspect that making the pod-less rocket glide will give it a less realistic recovery, rather than a more realistic one. The Baka was a rocket plane, a very crude and flimsy one that had little in the way of glide trim. The rocket motor gave it speed and range, but shortly after the motor burned out the Baka went into a steep dive. The rocket motor was meant to get it to the target, and then the pilot was to steer his plane toward a ship as it plunged down to the sea. Designing a plane so that it would be flyable in a controlled glide following a rocket boost involves some rather sophisticated engineering, and the Baka definitely did not have any. It took the Germans quite some time to develop the Heinkel He-176 and the Messerscmitt Me-163, and they just barely got them into production before the war's end. The Baka was by no means comparable to these designs, nor was it built anywhere near as well. If the Kamikaze pilot even managed to regain consciousness following the brutal rocket boost, he had nothing but extremely rudimentary controls to guide it during the high-speed dive.[/incorrect]

If I was to build this design, I would put a rather large spill hole in the second parachute so that as the rocket returned to ground nose first, it would not build up enough speed to be unsafe. A small parachute with a spill hole would probably be more effective than a streamer in preventing it from swinging back and forth so that the descent would at least somewhat resemble a dive bombing run.
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