Generation II Fueling

Waaay back when I first started building cannons, there was a member of the Spudtech forums named "DR" who liked to rustle feathers, build either extremely complicated or beautifully simple designs, and generally not give a fuck about what anybody else thought.

Anyway, he came up with a relatively accurate method (this was before the advent of air-through-meter and manometric fuel meters for hybrids) of fueling hybrid launchers which he dubbed "Generation II" fueling...

Basically, it worked like this:

• Build your standard hybrid with a small high pressure ignition chamber.
• Build a larger low-pressure tank several times larger in volume (multiply desired mix number by desired number of shots, multiply that by ignition chamber volume to get the larger tank's volume) than the ignition chamber.
• Combine these volumes, and inject the correct amount of fuel into the larger tank, like you would a normal combustion launcher.
• Inject water at pressure into the (sealed) larger tank, which will in turn pressurize the fuel/air mixture into the ignition chamber through a hose at the top of the tank.
• Seal off the two tanks and fire.
• Open the fueling valve and pressurize again.
• Fire.
• Repeat until no more air/fuel mixture is left.

It was quite a brilliant idea at the time, and I myself built my own version of it...

You can see the garden hose hookup in the above image... the ball valve across from the adapter is to purge the air from the garden hose when fueling, something which is actually quite important.

I also had plans for a handheld version which used compressed air and a piston, but never got around to it, and eventually, a host of better fueling methods surfaced.

While there are better choices today for fueling, this has simply been your step back in spudding history...