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Kryten

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  • 1 month later...

They're planning a ringsail parachute rather than a parasail for their first recovery attempt, which means they've either decided not to pursue helicopter catching or they're intending to increment towards that on further attempts.

Also, they named the recovery attempt flight 'Return to Sender' which I love :D

Edited by RealKerbal3x
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13 minutes ago, RealKerbal3x said:

, which means they've either decided not to pursue helicopter catching

They're at least not doing it for the first recovery.  They want to fish it out of the water and see what kind of re-entry damage there is to see if this is even possible.

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Looks like descent rates for ringsails are possibly in line with parasails.

https://airborne-sys.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/aiaa-1999-1700_evolution_of_the_ringsail.pdf

Pg 10 shows a distribution of descent rates between ~<20 and ~45 ft/s (heavily bunched between 20-30 ft/s. Hard to tell what parasail descent rates are for heavy payloads. It's below 20 ft/s (sorry for the garbage units, that's the stuff I'm finding), but that data mostly seems to be for humans as the payload, and I assume it would be faster for something heavy, particularly since they are volume and mass limited in the interstage (they probably can't make the sail area scale to a human parasail for a booster).

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On 11/6/2020 at 3:21 PM, tater said:

 

Looks like descent rates for ringsails are possibly in line with parasails.

https://airborne-sys.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/aiaa-1999-1700_evolution_of_the_ringsail.pdf

Pg 10 shows a distribution of descent rates between ~<20 and ~45 ft/s (heavily bunched between 20-30 ft/s. Hard to tell what parasail descent rates are for heavy payloads. It's below 20 ft/s (sorry for the garbage units, that's the stuff I'm finding), but that data mostly seems to be for humans as the payload, and I assume it would be faster for something heavy, particularly since they are volume and mass limited in the interstage (they probably can't make the sail area scale to a human parasail for a booster).

Think the main benefit of an parasail is that you have much more control, the capture helicopter might well be in an dive to reduce the relative velocity. 
Assume the parasail could trade attitude for speed too but that might be complex better to just lock an trajectory. 

As I understand the old WW2 ring sails had no control, one of the D-day paratroopers ended up in an well, the cartoon type one, another hit an church tower. 

Edited by magnemoe
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