C. Newport wrote:
At LDRS, the rocket had several problems. It was over
stable and one fin was slightly misaligned (I think) which caused pitch-roll
coupling and the eventual breakup. I cannot afford to lose too many of these
things hence this effort to do a higher fidelity dynamic analysis.


To me, the video looked like the motor had become misaligned, or one of
the fins had suffered some sort of structural failure in flight, that
caused it to generate excessive drag on one side of the vehicle; say
coming free at the forward end and having that part bend sideways from
the airflow going over it. I think misalignment would just cause it to
start spinning on its axis more that doing the spiraling motion visible
in the video.

Pat