Make them go, "Oh, oh, oh" As you shoot across the sky

December 27, 2014 1:34 AM

A somewhat impressive firework display (SLYT)
posted by fearfulsymmetry (40 comments total)

That was entirely not what I was expecting, but was entirely awesome.

Mods, please delete the word "somewhat" from the text of the FPP.
posted by hippybear at 2:22 AM on December 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Sorry, I'm British
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:26 AM on December 27, 2014 [18 favorites]

Rather.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:05 AM on December 27, 2014

Showed this to my kids the other day and they had the same reaction as me. "That is the most awesome thing ever!".
posted by greenhornet at 3:19 AM on December 27, 2014

What's the language? Where are these odd people?
posted by jrochest at 3:22 AM on December 27, 2014

The poster of the video is Turkish.
posted by louche mustachio at 3:31 AM on December 27, 2014

What's the language? Where are these odd people?

Thailand Rocket Festival
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:36 AM on December 27, 2014

I have no words. Thank you so much for posting this. It made my morning.
posted by kinnakeet at 3:53 AM on December 27, 2014

He turned off his computer, never to turn it on again. In fact, he never used the internet again. After seeing that, why would he ever need to?
posted by double block and bleed at 3:54 AM on December 27, 2014 [6 favorites]

Yeah yeah yeah ... WHAT???

The parachute was the icing on the cake.
posted by carter at 4:11 AM on December 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

YTDoubler
posted by carter at 4:24 AM on December 27, 2014 [7 favorites]

Where can I get one of those! I've looked all over Amazon.com.
posted by TedW at 4:27 AM on December 27, 2014

That is the Pied Piper of fireworks. Surely, the Turks could take ISIS with those.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 5:09 AM on December 27, 2014

Surely, the Turks could take ISIS with those.

Maybe.

But, by the look of things, they'll first have to ask some Laotians and/or northeastern Thais for background know-how as well as technical support.

(The YT link is to a Turkish uploader... one of many uploaders of this video. For more on the Thai Rocket Festival... see fearfulsymmetry's comment.)
posted by Mister Bijou at 5:26 AM on December 27, 2014

Hell yes.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:16 AM on December 27, 2014

I was all like 'pfft, it's daytime, no way this is going to be that cool'. I was wrong.
posted by shelleycat at 6:48 AM on December 27, 2014 [4 favorites]

I have occasionally been in aircraft flying over cities where there was a fireworks display going on (New Year's Eve/Fourth of July/Canada Day/Guy Fawkes Day/whatever). This is the first time I have seen one where I hoped the organizers had declared a no-fly zone above it.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:16 AM on December 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Exceeds expectations!
posted by achrise at 8:37 AM on December 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

The giant cloud of smoke only makes it better when the thing actually works. This made my day.
posted by ob1quixote at 9:07 AM on December 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

I did not at all understand what was happening, which made it all the more glorious when it happened.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 9:29 AM on December 27, 2014 [3 favorites]

I am really impressed at the burn time of those motors -- they were full thrust for close to 40 seconds.

This is *not* a toy, folks. It's really cool and well done, but there's more than enough KE in there to really wreck your day.

When it burnt out, I was all "That's going to leave a mark when it lands" then the chute came out.

Well done.
posted by eriko at 9:35 AM on December 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

If only (if only) Collier's 1952 space station could have taken off like this.
posted by cenoxo at 9:52 AM on December 27, 2014

What could possibly go wrong?
posted by sacrifix at 9:53 AM on December 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

I wonder how many times they practiced before setting it off in public? Did they use full-sized mockups? Scale models? CAD-CAM? It would be pretty hard to just build something like that and have it work perfectly on the first try.

Also, an in-depth post on that whole Thai rocket festival would be really cool. I am busy this weekend or I might try it myself.
posted by TedW at 10:11 AM on December 27, 2014

I was all like 'pfft, it's daytime, no way this is going to be that cool'. I was wrong.

I was thinking "Daytime? That probably means this is going to be one of those things where something catches fire and all the fireworks go off at once." I was rooting for everyone to run away sooner.
posted by aubilenon at 11:02 AM on December 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

Wow, as a kid playing with Estes rockets I came up with this idea, and always wondered if it would actually work. Now I know!
posted by thrind at 12:20 PM on December 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

This looks like just the thing to have launched Wan Hu on. Just attach a lawnchair and more rockets and you're set.
posted by crapmatic at 12:24 PM on December 27, 2014

That was fantastic. With all the smoke and fire, I thought it was an accident until the parachute opened!
posted by mochapickle at 12:35 PM on December 27, 2014

Wan Hu's view, if he were gyroscopically stabilized. Jump to 3:22 if the timed link doesn't work (which it doesn't if YT decides to play an ad), then go back and watch the rest of the video for a behind the scenes. (If you, like me, found this awesome, the word you're looking for is girandola.)
posted by fragmede at 1:49 PM on December 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!"
posted by Rhaomi at 1:54 PM on December 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

Right. After thinking a few hours and considering the aerodynamic problems and the uneven burn rates of gunpowder I'm going to call hoax. :-(. We'd be hard pressed to get a precision machine to do that.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:55 PM on December 27, 2014

(Specifically after it comes out of the cloud)
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:07 PM on December 27, 2014

That was astounding. I love big scale fireworks and the ones at the Olympics are usually pretty great for me anyway.

But these people are on a whole nother level. That said, can you expand on the aerodynamic problems and such? I'd be really curious to know if this is impossible/plausible/possible.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 6:56 PM on December 27, 2014

...I'm going to call hoax...

Are you calling hoax on all girandolas or just this one?
posted by lastobelus at 1:50 AM on December 28, 2014 [5 favorites]

Fragmede's link is marvellous (as is the main post). I knew nothing about girandolas this morning, and now I know what it would be like to ride in one.
posted by bonobothegreat at 2:43 PM on December 28, 2014

Are you calling hoax on all girandolas or just this one?

Just this one, although I must admit I might have trouble crediting them at all if I hadn't seen some a few years back.

My problems with this one are:

1) It is clearly gyrating unevenly on the spindle only to emerge from the cloud absolutely steady.
2) You can of course get anything to lift with enough rockets, but keeping it going straight is a whole different deal. The girandolas I saw (and most of the ones I can find on YouTube) tend to veer.
3) (opinion) You need to keep those rockets perfectly in balance to avoid getting a serious wobble going. Keeping that many gunpowder rockets burning in sync for as long as they did strikes me as unlikely. They really do burn quite a while.

I'm not dead set on the post-launch footage being faked, but I wouldn't mind digging up a second video.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:25 PM on December 28, 2014

If you can dig up a second video of this specific launch, I will be impressed.

Plenty of other girandola videos online, though, and plenty of them seem to start out wobbly and straighten out once in flight. I can't comment about the length of the burn, but given that gunpowder has been a technology in use in Asia for ages, I don't doubt that they have some basic knowledge about how to create rockets that can burn at a consistent measured rate.

MetaFilter is always quite eager to declare fraud, I think due to past events. Sometimes things on a camera are exactly what they appear to be.
posted by hippybear at 4:33 PM on December 28, 2014

Here's a much longer video of the festival that includes several unsuccessful & semi-successful girandola launches. I don't think this was faked.
posted by scalefree at 4:46 PM on December 28, 2014 [3 favorites]

Thanks scalefree. In light of that I'm going to file the one in the post under "Do enough and one of them is going to be near perfect."

I am definitely impressed with the burns, though.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:35 PM on December 29, 2014

Fireworks factory explodes in Colombia
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:09 AM on January 5, 2015