Design
The Fire Arrow was the first rocket in mechanism and design. It was made in a variety of forms and launched in diverse manners, but the first design consisted of a pouch of black powder with a stick attached; the arrows were launched from a stand of bamboo sticks. Like the fins on a modern rocket, the long stick on a fire arrow increases stability and therefore accuracy. (It works by causing the center of drag to be far behind the center of mass, so that atmospheric drag keeps the arrow oriented toward its direction of travel.)
Chinese and Korean fire arrows were usually launched in salvoes from launch platforms such as arrays of cylinders or boxes which could hold as many as 1,000 fire arrows each. The fire arrows propelled by gunpowder may have had a range of up to 1,000 feet.
Fire arrows were tipped with flammable materials like pitch, bitumen or resin.
Read more about this topic: Fire Arrow
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ’s sake not black—
nor white either—and not polished!
Let it be weathered—like a farm wagon—”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)