[closet astronaut]

You sound like you have extensive experiance in launchable rockets. I have a question. My step mom's father and his boys did quite abit of rocketing years ago, they used to tell stories of a sat v they launched that used smaller engines and could make the rocket come off the pad slow like the real thing. Now in all the years of launching model rockest I've never duplicated this or seen or heard of anyone doing this. I'm wondering if this would even be possible, using a large rocket with mutiple engines say three or four, the only problem I can see would be getting all of them to lite at the exact same time. I think this would be the ultimate launch, lots of smoke and a slow steady lift off.

On you'r Atlas I noticed no stablizer fins, mybe because of the smaller size? Mine has stablizers that slide into the outer engine bells with the engine mounted in the center. The cause of the bad flight was that the engine pushed it's mount up into the main body and threw of the trajectory, it parcially melted the center engine bell. It hit the ground before the cone ejector detinated, there was some tube crushing also.

And yea this is the estes, it's three and a half diameter and about thirty six inches length from engine bell to tip of the LET.

Ok ..I went back and looked at you'r pics again, the flames are the stableizers, I thought at first they were just for a realizm effect. I like those much better than what came with the estes.