Yeah, backsliders are known to do that >.<. Apparently, if you don't get it just right, it'll backslide 95% of the time (so unless you do twenty trials you'll never notice), but nosedive the other 5% of the time. I really wish the event supervisors had let us pick launch moment so we could wait for the wind to die down.personasaurus rex wrote:don't even get me started on bottle rocket. Our bottle kids worked SO HARD on it and they built it so that it would glide down parallel to the ground slowly, and we were testing amazing times before the competition. We get to West Point, and naturally, it's windy near the river there, and it goes up, starts gliding down perfectly, then the wind comes and BOOM it nosedives. =/gneissisnice wrote:Yeah, I think Bottle Rocket is an awful event for a few reasons:
1) it's weather dependent. A gust of wind can hurt or help any team (depending if it boosts it up or down), and if it rains during the competition...well, sucks to be you.
2) Not every team can test it outdoors. Like you said, you live in an area where you can't launch it. That's a problem.
3) At states, the winning time was 25 seconds. In my opinion, any event where a 1st place score is 25 seconds is a poorly designed event, because with such a short time, the distribution of scores ends up being really close, and that's not a very good event. Something like planes, with a winning time of, say, 3 minutes, is better because that doesn't mean that half the teams have the same time like you get in Bottle Rockets.
Just out of curiosity, what sorts of times were you getting?
