1/2-scale AIM-120 AMRAAM

Motivation

A couple of years ago, Rocketry Warehouse had an introductory offer for the Performance 3.5 inch, 1/2 scale AMRAAM kit as part of their Black Friday sale. I couldn't resist. I generally prefer to design and build my own airframes, but my son was working on a custom build of a 1/3-scale Maverick missile, and I thought it would be fun to embark on a scale missile project in parallel.

A neat feature of this kit design is that the strake fins are mounted through the wall of both a piece of airframe tubing and a longer piece of coupler tubing to a 54mm inner tube. This makes for a very stout airframe (often a problem with AMRAAM builds), and provides a mid-airframe electronics bay that's 54mm diameter and 15 inches long! Just perfect for our Altus Metrum flight computers with radio downlink antennas.

Design Details

• Performance Rocketry kit in 3.5 inch G-12, which consists of all the pieces shown in this kit flyer.
• Aero Pack 54mm flanged retainer
• Altus Metrum MegaMetrum flight computer

Electronics

I chose the MegaMetrum for this design, even though it's overkill in many ways, both because I needed more test flights on MegaMetrum prototypes, and because I'm really curious to see if we can measure spin rate on this crazy 8-finned airframe using the gyros...

Build

Built starting in mid-March of 2013.

Photos

I've put all the build photos together in one place.

Flights

The intended first flight of this AMRAAM will be at the NAR 2013 National Sport Launch.