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Published: 2021-03-06 15:47:46 +0000 UTC; Views: 1473; Favourites: 15; Downloads: 0
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Description
At the beginning of the pandemic, I sat back in my den of design planning on a long period of sequestered privacy as work was going to be shuttered for the safety of us all...That lasted approximately 1 and 1/2 days, as we were suddenly listed as a 'vital service', and were again opened for business. But in that short moment of looking about the place for something to do, I looked at a pile of junk that I had acquired from shopGoodwill. In my hobby of model rocketry, and on my Facebook Group, I do a series called ROCKET RESCUE, where I take kits that I get from sites like shopGW and restore them. In said pile was what we call a 'fin can' - a part of a modern quick-build kit that has fins attached, holds the engine and connects to a paper body tube. To us rocket fiends who design and build our fancies using templates, glue, spit and determination, these are cheats. But, they are a norm these days in the hobby, so we live with them - we don't have to like them much, but, meh...
Thing is, in this case, some novice had taken what should have been a simple slap-it-together rocket and botched it up with one stroke of a tube of glue. The idea of these types of fin cans is that there is a removable locking ring on the bottom that allows you to insert a rocket engine and lock it in - it's kind of hard to do that when you glue this ring to the rest of the fin can! ORG!
This meant that to use this part, the whole thing would have to be disassembled, which pretty much meant destroying the rocket that was attached to it - which wasn't such a waste as I already had a working built version of this particular kit, and what had been badly built on the bottom of this particular model had also been done to the upper part as well. RIP - TEAR - MASTICATE!
So, after many hours of cleaning and chipping and removing glue from where glue wasn't suppose to be, I wound up with a perfectly good sin to all rocketry sitting before me. There had to be something I could do with this abomination. That's when I allowed my mind to wander into the what-if realm of possible rockets of Science Fiction - a design that could be a working model of a system where mankind could start their venture into the stars via a spaceport/station built of a modular pods interlinked in ways that allowed multiple configurations - from a straight line of units, to rings, to geodesic forms, the designs and uses could be infinite. But to make this a possibility, there would need to be a launch vehicle to get them up there. This is where the MSSLV comes into play. This massive rocket is designed to put this heavy load up into an extra high orbit to ensure the best clear-space location away from the cloud of satellites that surround the planet for construction. At least, that is the theory proposed to this design of mine.
The model itself is seated on the rescued fin can, and grew from there. The SRBs at its base are built using plastic nose cones on both ends - the thrust bells were rounded cones where I cut off their shoulders and inserted and glued the round cone part in at an angle to give them their canted exhaust look. The body wraps are Bristol with detail brayed into them with my ball point styluses. Antennae and ullage rockets are balsa scraps. The payload section is wrapped in Bare-Metal Gold Foil, and the body art detail on the main rocket and upper section, as well as the wraps used on the SRBs were created using Microsoft Photo Editor (from Office Pro XP) and MS Paint, and printed on Avery Clear Label stock.