Subsonic Nose Cone — Everything You Need to Know (With Real Numbers!) By Misfa Daran J| Aerospace & Rocketry Simplified Here's a piece of humor to share. My initial idea of learning about nose cones was, the more pointed the better. Logical, right? Sharp knife cuts better than a blunt one. So sharp nose cone must be better than a rounded one. I was hit with a hole in my education. In fact, a rounded nose cone is superior at subsonic speeds than a sharp nose cone. . . Let us get into it! What is Subsonic Speed? Let's start by clarifying what subsonic is.First, let's define subsonic. The term subsonic is used to refer to aeronautic speeds under the sonic speed. The speed of sound at sea level is around 15°C temperature, which is about 34 3 metres per second or around 1235 km/h. Subsonic flight is flight at speeds below Mach 0.8 (about 274 m/s or 986 km/h). For comparison, most model rockets have Mach numbers between 0.1 and 0.5, far in the subsonic regime. If you ...
