u/KaChau3D

J425R

This is my capsule drone Whale Noir, a payload for a Cal Poly Pomona's Project Lazarus, a high power rocket entered into a Friends of Amateur Rocketry, FAR Unlimited 2026 competition, which launched last weekend.

5 inch bi props, 1720kv motors, 6S 2000mAh 100C battery, along with a flight controller, gps, remote id, elrs receiver, and a o4 lite topped with a little 24V fan for cooling. Total weight is roughly 850 grams or 1.9 pounds.

Frame is completely custom 3D printed from scratch. I designed it myself in CAD through countless hours of trial and error prototyping before printing the final version in mostly ABS with the main arms and hub/lid in PAHT-CF(PA6-CF). Everything is then sandwiched together with 4 m3 rods spanning the entire vertical length The three CAD drawings are of preliminary V2 of the drone, with a different arm retention mechanism. The arms are spring loaded, deploy automatically, and lock into place in their open position to prevent harmonic oscillations destroying flight quality.

I designed Whale Noir to be follow competition and FAA requirements, ejecting from the rocket(in its collapsed state) as the main parachute deploys but staying tethered to the rocket as it descends to 400 feet of altitude, where I them remotely trigger a servo release to fully separate and deploy the arms at the same time. Following full separation I can then fly the drone all the way back to the launch site.

Although our launch was almost flawless, there were still a few hiccups. My biggest fear which became reality was the O4 video unit overheating as the little fan ran out of air in its sealed space. Other onboard electronics had issues delaying our launch 5 minutes too long and I lost video feed which did not recover so I chose to stay tethered to the rocket until it landed. Second was the main parachute became stuck and did not deploy so the rocket descended much faster than it was supposed to on landing, impacting the ground at roughly 50 ft/s.

The drone was not supposed to take any impact at all as its designed to deploy from the air. Upon inspection after landing, several non critical areas were damaged. The battery base was cracked through in several pieces, the fan on top was missing several fins and not spinning, and the entire frame looked like a parallelogram with every core rod crooked. The PA6-CF hub and arms suffered no noticeable damage likely due to the retention cap keeping them safe in their collapsed state.

Despite all of this damage from an extreme impact it was never meant to experience, after manually deploying the drone from the ground, I was given permission to walk back to my original location at a bunker on the launch site, and fly the drone all the way back 0.6 miles. It flew like it was in mint condition even with two bent fins.

Out of the 2000 points a successful deployment and flight normally would have gotten us, we scored a 1600 since the drone was still able to make the trip back with 0 repairs or changes aside from deploying the drone as it would on its own in the air.