Component Details

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Overview

These are all of the components that you can expect to utilize when designing in OpenRocket, although individual components will be shaded until available for use with other compatible components.

Component Details -- OpenRocket 15.02

Component Classes

The components available in OpenRocket are divided into four classes based upon component function. These classes are assembly components, external components, internal components, and mass components (which include recovery components).

Assembly Components Class

The assembly class of components allows you to create individual or multiple stages, and to add boosters and even pods.

Help with Assembly Components Basics

Body Components and Fin Sets Class

The body components and fin sets, including launch guides, allows you dramatic flexibility in designing rockets, from the most basic to the extremely complex. These components can be generally divided by purpose into three areas, components from which the outer airframe is made, the rockets fins, and the components that guide the rocket until it accelerates to a safe and stable speed.

Body Components Class

The body components class consists of the parts that make up the outer airframe of a rocket; nose cones, body tubes, and transitions. Although the top of virtually every rocket is a nose cone, OpenRocket allows these components to be combined in virtually any order, from simple model rockets with just a nose cone and a body tube, to complex designs that feature multiple body tube in a variety of diameters, with transitions in-between.

Help with Body Components Basics

Fin Sets Class

The fin sets class of components allows you to select fins from the traditional trapezoidal and elliptical shapes, to just about any shape you can think of by using the freeform fin set editor. And, with the click of a button, you can transform trapezoidal and elliptical fins to freeform so that you can easily change the look and feel of your fin sets. For those who favor ring fins, Open rocket offers that option as well. And, you can mix and match fin types, such as having trapezoidal fins in-between ring fins.

Help with Fin Sets Basics

Launch Guides Class

The launch guides class of components allows you to choose from launch lugs for low and mid power rockets to rail guides for your mid to high power needs. Although OpenRocket does not currently directly feature launch shoes, even that guide option may be simulated using the freeform fin set.

Help with Launch Guides Basics

Inner Components Class

The inner components class of components literally makes the rocket work, from the inside out; without these components there would be very little holding your rocket together; these components provide the surfaces necessary to glue the parts as the rocket is assembled. These components include such things as couplers to hold body tube together, bulkheads for avionics bay lids, inner tubes for baffles, centering rings to mount inner motor tubes, and engine blocks to keep the motor from going inside the rocket on launch; these components have many other uses when designing a rocket. Everything you need to construct the skeleton of the rocket.