In 1999, I started studying my copy of Topics in Advanced Model Rocketry while recovering from knee surgery. I particularly enjoyed Gordon Mandell's chapter in Topics in Advanced Model Rocketry on dynamic stability, in part because it used modeling methods similar to what I used in my work as an electrical engineer for designing rf circuits. Each chapter Topics in Advanced Model Rocketry covers a different part of the analysis of a rocket flight, but never puts all the pieces together to build a complete flight trajectory model. So I started working on building a rocket flight simulation model focused on helping to understand the dynamic stability. The purpose of the simulator was to understand the dynamics of a rocket's flight - ultimately to aid in designing an active vertical trajectory system (VTS), a project I started in 2022 and will document here as well. I put all the pieces together to build a complete 6 degree-of-freedom flight trajectory model. The model covers both the trajectory of the rocket in three dimensions as well as the attitude (yaw, pitch, and roll) of the rocket.
Along the way, I ran into questions that have resulted in a number of side investigations Topics have included rotational dynamic stability and why rockets are so stable, how far a rocket turns into the wind, and understanding the mechanisms of coning. I have written papers to document some of this work, and they are available below. I will continue to make these papers available here as I complete them.
