Well, I'm going to make my own homemade firecrackers to blow shit up in my back yard, so today after work I went to Wal-Mart to buy some large model rocket engines which is a fairly cost-effective way to get that gunpowdery stuff without like going into a gun store and paying $100 for those big containers.
So it's 12:24 PM, I'm walking in a fairly abandoned store (it's dead at night), and I get some stuff like the DVDs of Army Of Darkness and The Fifth Element, 6 large bags of Pop Rocks, CD-Rs, PEZ refills (screw the dispensers, just give me the candy!), 2 Halloween sound effects CDs and some razors. What was I here for again?
OH YEAH, f*ckING CYLINDERS OF EXPLOSIVE POWER! I thought they were on the back wall, but no, this space is now delegated to Hannah Montana bicycles. WTF is a Hannah Montana anyway? Girls are stupid. Anyways, I look at the "model" section, and there's lots of cars, and paint, no rockets though. About an aisle down there's some really tempting next-gen Tamagotchis that blow the original out of the proverbial water and
THE MOST AWESOME PARROT IN THE UNIVERSE but nope, it was pyros over parrots today.
So I see a dumb bitch in the electronic toy aisle (home to the 20 Q games, Lazer Tag, the TV games without a home, the flavor of the month overpriced Casio that couldn't even stand up to the SB16 WaveBlaster daughtercard, etc..) and I ask her while she's talking to two of her ditzy friends:
"Do you have any model rocket engines?", this IMO being a fairly innocent question.
Of course this is all taking place in post-9/11 Texas, so what follows is a look that can only be described as the look of a Dubya-lovin country girl's face after seeing Osama Bin Laden bust through her dining room window and squish one out over her three-year-old's American flag birthday cake.
Of course, snapping back to her low-level coded job response, she's all "They'ruh over here". She leads me over to them, and they're right next to the new shitty Transformers figures. Those Wallyworld employees are SNEAKY BASTARDS, hiding just what I need right in the spot that I purposefully tried to avoid!
Now that I had this Estes treasure trove in front of me, it was time to get to work. I've never really been into model rockets. I had a couple a few years ago, and we actually launched some at my school a few years back as well. They're way too much effort to build for just a whoosh (although it's an
impressive whoosh) and a dinky little parachute. Basically, I'm into rockets for 2 things. The engines, and the electronic detonator---err I mean igniter.
You may think it's just pick up some engines and pay for them, but actually it's a little bit trickier. If you've ever actually decided to crack open a model rocket engine, you'd see the black powder we're after, as well as this grey stuff that I'm assuming is chalk. This is where the problem lies. See, Estes likes to cheat the law of physics I call the "Coke Can Theory". You know how when you get a can of Coke and pour it into a glass, it makes like a clown car and has a lot more Coke than you think there would be? Yeah, Estes decides to cheat that. If you get the little tubes that have double the diameter of a pencil, there is SERIOUSLY less black powder than the big engine inside.
And I don't mean "well duh no shit Sherlock" less, I mean "How the f*ck does this even launch into the f*cking air!?" less. At first I decided it was some sort of warlock trickery, but eventually I settled on the theory that the little tubes need less powder because with the compression it has from being smaller it would have a greater chance of being the
Challenger instead of the
Discovery (which launches in like 4 days, or so I'm led to believe). The bigger engines, being bigger and all, can afford to have less endplug and more black goodness.
It's all about ratios and proportions and stuff. I don't know, I got C's in math and was always trying to get Galaga to work on the TI's instead of using them for math. I guess Wal-Mart was too, as they must have failed the proportions course. Price of large model rocket engines (C6-5s, if anybody cares)? $5.99. Price of small engines (A-somethings, because I don't care)? $5.99. The large had three big engines and enough powder to probably fuel a cheap M80 knockoff. The smaller engines were a 6-pack and had enough powder to fuel one of those retarded firework chickens that lay shitty colored spark eggs and are WAY overpriced but you still get them anyway because someone always says "LET'S GET A CHICKEN!".
So remember 3 > 6, More < Less, it's Bizarroworld in the rocket industry. Don't be an idiot.
Anyway, as I'm putting my profound knowledge of rocketry to the test, All-American-Girl™ is still there watching me.
"So do you LIKE model rockets?" she says.
I look back at her, "Yeah, I do".
"What kind do you have at home?" she says, trying to find something to out me as some potential member of the white Al-Qaeda.
She almost had me. But I'm cool. Sylvester Stallone as Jack Carter in the remake of "Get Carter" cool. I'm so cool I make the
smiley
.
So I replied:
"Yeah, you see those 2 small tubes up there? I have a couple of those, but mine are a bit larger, back before Estes discontinued them for cost concerns and also because of some of my custom mods. Y'see, basically I take the parachute out of them and hollow out the nose cone, which I reapply with a bit of watered-down Krazy Glue for weight purposes. I then take one of my dad's Dremels and hollow out the inside more to make them as light as I possibly can. I take off one of the fins so I have the ability to angle it for maximum distance than I wrap some duct-tape lightly around the engine to fit and then when it launches, it touches the stratosphere! Of course it's a messy landing due to the lack of a chute, but hey it's a game of height and distance, we're not trying to beat the Soviets."
I don't even know if any of that made any sense at all. But it was enough to pacify her feeble sheep mind.
She was all "OK." and walked off. She's probably chomping down on her Marlboros in her trailer right now feeling like an idiot. And she is.
She works at Wal-Mart.
Topic: The effects of terrorism on modern day Wal-Mart. (Read 519 times)
