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Comment by polishdude20 | Hacker News Reader

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polishdude20·

Yeah and UAV's last longer and it doesn't cost $15 a pop for a 3 second burn time.

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Many many orders of magnitude longer and thousands of km further on hydrocarbon fuels ;)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_Butts%27_Farm

Are there any promising hybrid engines or are we stuck with solid fuel for the time being?

For model rocket stuff of this size, yeah all we got is solid motors. I've seen some larger amateur rockets that use liquid fuel though but at that point, that leaves "amateur single person" territory and it's more for larger institutions or clubs.

I flew high-power rockets under a Tripoli certification back in the late 90s. The Aerotech hybrid system looked really attractive to me at the time. I wasn't in a financial position to take the plunge, though.

I've thought about getting back into the hobby and it looks like all the hybrid systems have disappeared. The ATF permitting for solid fuel motors seemed pretty onerous back in the late 90s (I always flew at launches where I could purchase reloads for my Aerotech RMS on-site so I didn't have to deal with transporting motors) and I assume it got worse after 9/11.

Anybody know what ever happened to the hybrid systems? Aerotech's website looks like it stopped being updated about the time I left the hobby. Same goes w/ their competitor Hypertek (which I thought had a ridiculous ground-support system).

I've noticed the same. Maybe all of this YouTube tinkering will help revitalize the hobby.

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