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| 12th Annual Lake Lucerne Bottle Rocket War January 9th through 12th |
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| Bottle Rocket War Weekend featured plenty of cold and little snow. |
| Fort construction went generally well. On the second day the device used to tamp the snow (a 6X6 with handles) was replaced by Krispa. This turned out to be a mistake in that Krispa had little to no interest in proper snow packing. The tippy walls that resulted shamed us all. |
| Dean's fort did freeze before falling and was accentuated by a special firing port. |
| Mr. & Mrs. Nemo's fort featured ice buttresses and red ice orbs resulting in a structure both stunning and functional. |
| The ice buttresses were poured the night before in special molds and lifted into place after wall fabrication. |
| Jim's fort was donated. He was busy on Saturday afternoon and could not participate in fort construction. It's main accent was walls. |
| Jeff's fort had interesting little snow things on the top. They were equally spaced and of uniform size for the most part. There were 9 of them. The second one from the left was struck during the war. |
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| The war began on Saturday, January 11th at 7:00 PM. The following pictures were taken with a remote 35mm camera setup to take 3 minute exposures (50mm,f 1.4,400 ASA). |
| Jim came out strong. His mighty start was attributed to his lack of fatigue (he was busy taking a test during the fort construction process). |
| Krispa's roman candle attack was overshadowed by large rockets from a rogue power near the dock. His attack would have still been spectacular if only he did not have tippy walls. |
| The brilliant moon helped in keeping the volume of fire high during the entire 90 minutes of the event. |
| Evidence of a rogue force near the dock is clear on the left of this picture. |
| The temperature started at 10 F and fell during the battle to 6 F. |
| A shorter exposure was taken in our fort later during the war. The sky cleared and the stars were visible despite a bright waxing moon. |
| The morning after was crisp and cold. This did not help in the great stick pickup that follows the war. |
| Much of the ordnance landed in such a way as to be an effective sundial. We all had watches so we picked them all up anyway. |
| The last thing to do was to drill a hole to measure the thickness of the ice. |
| The ice is almost 16 inches thick. |