 Today, we're chasing some rockets. So we've been getting into crazy chase shots. FPV drones are an amazing tool for getting video clips unlike anything else. You can use these drones to get really dynamic shots, retracing objects as they're speeding down the road or flying through the air. We did a shoot recently where Vanover chased an arrow flying through the air. It was such a great shot. It was so cool, but it took a lot of tries. It was really difficult, but the payoff was awesome and we've been thinking, how can we top that? What's something else that flies through the air that we gotta chase? What's gonna be that next big challenge? Rockets, it's kind of like an arrow, right? And to leave a trail of smoke, hopefully get more time in the air, right? I did rockets with my dad as a kid, so I've definitely got some experience with it. My friend Mike and I were talking about doing some rockets with our kids and it just happened to correlate to what we wanted to do. Yeah, so you picked up some rockets from Amazon. How much is this guy? These are about 15 bucks. Cheap thing that could make for a really awesome shot, but as it turns out, these little guys are kind of really tough to chase. They're a little bit too fast. I lost it. Oh, is that it? Wow, that is not gonna be easy. I didn't realize that the smaller they are, the faster they are, because this is super lightweight. A really thin tube and then some very light plastic on the bottom, this weighs next to nothing. Not only that, they're really small and really hard to keep in frame and when you have them in frame, they just look like they're so far away. Yeah, so it's just not giving us the shots. I thought it would be challenging to keep up with it, but it was just gone. It was pretty far off in the distance for me, but I could still kind of see the smoke trail. I just hunted down the smoke trail, right? Yeah, the smoke trail was a little found. But we were finding these little rockets really challenging to chase and just really not yielding an epic shot, right? So we got to think and just need a bigger rocket, right? Just build our own. My daughter actually watches another YouTube channel called King of Random and I just happened to stumble across them building their own homemade rockets. They called it the randomizer rocket. I made a few changes to it, but you can actually build it out of just parts you have laying around. This is a rocket. Stop touching it. Well, I'm gonna stop touching it. It is a peel. I've designed it to try to look like the SpaceX rocket. It has the look. It has the look. It has the feel. I think I'm gonna be able to be closer and therefore also I'm gonna shoot it at a much higher frame rate. So I'm shooting this at 240. So we get that super sexy slow motion footage of the rocket flying higher and higher into the sky. So this is Bobby FPV. He's been doing some episodes with us lately. He's one of my favorite freestyle pilots by my side. He does that flowy thing. Now I don't know if I've seen you do a whole lot of like chasing or like subject-based flying where you're like chasing cars or anything like that. Have you done that much before? I think I've only chased like my grandfather's car like just going around the street now. Yeah. It's gonna be a little bit difficult. It's a small target with a lot of acceleration. I think so loud on here. No, we're lagging away. Oh, it's straight for it. Oh, it's straight for it. So this is definitely a lot easier, but it's certainly no easy feat. And when we did the Arrow episode, I mean, we fired that thing over and over I think I shot the thing a hundred times. But when you fire an Arrow, it's free, right? Pick it up, fire it again. Firing a rocket, there's a price every time because you can only burn these engines one time. These things were pretty cheap. The engines turned out to be a little more expensive. Yeah, we started burning through engines and dollars. Not only that, they were hard to find. Right. So what are we gonna do about that? So then I decided to start making my own engines. I did a little bit of research. I learned how to make my own engines out of PVC pipe, kitty litter, potassium nitrate, and sugar. So I bought a lot of PVC so we can make a lot of engines. Shoot multiple rockets. Does the engine stay in the PVC? Oh, the PVC is the engine. The PVC is the engine. Oh, because they used like a cardboard thing before. Right, normally they use a cardboard thing, but this is a really big engine. This is comparable to an E45 engine. We've so far only used A and C. The bigger the letter, the more power you get. So an engine is just a hard tube that holds your propellant and then has like caps on their side. Yeah, I couldn't believe how simple it was to make. You got some science. Yeah, some science. And then we got some cooking. Cookies cooking. I mean, put it in the blender. I guess that's just rocket fuel. So we've got, is this actual rocket fuel? That's actually rocket fuel. Don't shake that too hard. We've just got some rocket fuel here. All right, so you cut pieces of PVC pipe, you mix up some rocket fuel, and then you pound it in, right? So you've got your little dowel here. And then the only other thing you really need is actually kitty litter, right? What purposes does that serve? The kitty litter is the plug on the top and the bottom. You get hammered in there and it makes a plug. It's going to be an inert plug, right? So that's not going to burn. Then you put your rocket fuel in there. That's the danger zone. Danger zone. And then you put another save zone, you put another plug of kitty litter up top, and you drill out one of the ends. Turns out that drilling the hole is really important to get that right. Yeah, that was one of the things that you struggled with the most. Definitely, yeah. Because the variances in the hole was creating all sorts of crazy different flights. They were shooting off to the side. Yeah, it was. It was too fast. Oh my gosh. There's something. Oh, wow. Ha ha ha ha ha. Oh. Oh. Really important to drill a very straight hole with exactly the right size. Yeah. But eventually, I feel like you were getting pretty good. Oh yeah, they got really awesome. 3, 2, 1. Oh my gosh. That was way better. So now we're making cheap engines. We've got a big rocket or a bigger rocket. We're trying to maximize our opportunity. We're getting as many pilots as we can in the air at the same time. So we try strategizing a little bit, right? So putting one pilot on the close-up from the launch, one pilot starting further away. Just doing everything we can to get our chances up. So we're flying with the DJI digital FPV system. While we're fiddling with these rockets, trying to get a reliable launch, we don't need to be too stressed about who's on what channel. It pretty much sorts it for us, right? So you just plug in everyone's on the system. It'll keep all the pilots from interfering with each other. Not only that, but it's easier to see the rockets too with the higher visibility. Oh yeah, once you're up. But even though the FPV system is in HD, it's very unpredictable, right? The wind is going to change its path. The igniters, right? The process of lighting these things off. So igniters are these things that tie into your fancy button. You hit the button. This burns, and it ignites the engine, right? And that turned out to be not 100% reliable. This thing doesn't have enough voltage. These things tend to be finicky. We're having so many failed launches. We're out there. All the pilots are ready to go, ready to chase. Why is it going off? It just doesn't take off. Three, two, one. Good. Two, one. All right. We had a lot of failures. It still seems not as reliable. I mean, that's really the biggest difficulty is that you can't time it. Three, two, one. Hit the button, and then it's going to light at some point. Exactly how long it's going to take for that igniter to cause a real reaction in the engine. It kind of varies. So it became really difficult to time your launch of the drone. So I found some new method to make better igniters out of nichrome wire that I got from Amazon. That turned out to be very reliable. Yeah. So you're basically getting it to as controlled of a point as you can. It's still not 100%. It's still a little bit of luck involved, right? Yeah. So ultimately, what we need to do is we need to get a rocket that is as big as possible so it's going to look good in the shot, and as slow as possible. And that's so slow that it's unstable, and curves often go some direction. We need a nice, stable trajectory that's going to be possible to chase and make for a good shot. Here we go. How about this? Is that? Is that big enough? Wait. On the ground, that's almost as tall as me. So this is about a five-foot rocket. This is the new prototype Sean's working on. Doubled up the foam feels strong. And again, it's just so lightweight. So I actually designed this. It's kind of inspired by flight tests and all of the building that I've been doing from back in the beginning with airplanes. David Vendis will actually inspire this top nose cone with his flight test Viggan. I actually made the nose cone to be a bumper. And unlike some of these other rockets where the nose cone deploys and then there's a parachute, this is not going to have that. But when we were trying chasing the foam rockets, I think it was actually making for a very cool shot for the rocket to just nose dive into the ground. The problem is they get beat up pretty quickly, right? Pretty fast. And that nose cone gets ruined. So you think you've got a solution to that, though? It can crush itself and save the rest of the body from damage. So I just tape it on there with some packing tape, and I can cut it off and slap another one on there when it crashes. So when you go out to the field, we're going to have a couple of the main bodies because you want to have a few different attempts. And then just a bunch of these nose cones. So we're carrying a DJI Osmo action. You can tune it with ND filters and shutter settings to make the most pleasing and cinematic image. So we're trying to use the screw on ND filter kits that we can tune the shutter speed to get good subject background separation, right? When you got your shutter speed tuned properly, you're going to get that blurry background for the motion. Everything is coming together to make a really good looking shot. This is going to be a really difficult shot to pull off. No matter how many variables we try to control, it's still going to come down to tremendous pilot skill and a little bit of luck, right? And some good weather, definitely. Yeah. All right, we're back out here. It's pretty hot as usual, but this time we've got four beautiful looking rockets built, and we've got lots of rocket engines to propel them. And I'm also thinking that this recipe is going to provide the most reliable performance we've ever had. So we should get lots of launches, lots of attempts to get the shot. We had a whole crew out here before. They're just trying to maximize their chances of getting the clip. And we got some really good clips, but not the clip. So we're back out here, pretty much on me and Sean to pull off this whole operation. Come on, pull up. Close to getting the shot that we're looking for. It's coming together. The rockets are behaving more predictably than ever, but there's still a lot of unknown. It's a lot of reacting to what's happening in the moment. If there's ever been any question about a digital FPV system having too much latency to do stuff like this, I think we're showing that it's plenty fast enough. And I'm glad that we have a really crisp image to actually react to. You need everything that you can on your side to make chasing one of these things as possible as possible. I have an X minus five, four, three, two, one, two. Well, I hope it was it. I mean, I'm happy to keep going, but I think, I don't know, I think I nailed it. I don't know. It's an awesome hobby, isn't it? It is a hobby. It sure is a lot of tinkering. I was getting pretty frustrated because I just wanted to have the shot. So I'm really glad that we had you figuring all this stuff out. As usual, Sean is just MVP. I love doing this. It was so much fun for me. I loved building things. I always loved building things and designing and come up with fixes for the problems. We had a lot of problems. Yeah, most importantly, we finally got our shot. The whole thing, it came out so good. I'm psyched on it. So Sean, thanks for putting in the work to make this happen. Thanks to DJI for sponsoring this episode for all the flying. We flew with the DJI digital FPV system. That's also available in the Roto Riot store. Link in the description. And most importantly of all, thank you guys for watching and for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed this episode. I'm the Drib. I'm Les Flair C. We'll see you next time on Roto Riot. This is rocket fuel. There he is. Yeah, it goes on the flinger right here. Should I drop a match in it? Yeah, just sit in this pile and drop a match in it. You want me to? It'd be great. Do you think I should? No, I don't think so. What if I did?