Crunch.

Few things are as stressful as your significant other falling 45 feet and shattering her legs beyond repair. Especially when you caused it.

Let me tell you, it does not do any favors for the relationship.

Thankfully, at least in my case, only the legs broke. The rest of her is apparently happy as a clam despite suffering a more-than-8G impact. The recording instruments measured 8G, but it’s possible the impact was higher:

(the chart covers 8.2 seconds of flight)

I don’t think the bouncing helped any. Ignore the blue and red lines which slope down monotonously. Those demonstrate how the GPS module has issues with rapidly dropping altitudes.

There is scant imagery from my day, since the one successful flight flew a downward-facing camera over a grassy field. Not exactly the height of interesting. At least I have lots of pictures of grass. And a few of my base station:

Checkout my wavy landing pad in the corner. I paid extra for wavy cardboard.

Oh well. Time to checkout the damage:

Okay, it’s a bit hard to see. But note just to the left of the DVD stack (under the chewing gum kit) is a pile of discarded carbon fiber plates which were the landing struts. Right above that you can see the ragged edges of some that are still attached to the arms but broke off. On the right side of the copter note that the legs broke off almost too high to notice.

That was a standoff that separated the two parts of a leg. Yes, those are the threads that were ripped out and are sticking out of either end. Likely not going to use this particular standoff again.

I guess I’m going to get a crash course in building landing gear.

In totally unrelated news, I went to California and had a blast (which is why I didn’t post last week or the week before). We went to an aquarium and I got a shark:

He looks less grainy and more adorable in real life.