SS-17 and Minuteman III

Here's some pics of the scratchbuilt Soviet SS-17 ICBM and US Minuteman III ICBM that I built close to 20 years ago... just recovered from the attic at Grandma's after she passed away last year...

Hope this works

They are very roughly the same scale, within about 20% IIRC; I have the figures in one of my old notebooks SOMEWHERE. They are made from Christmas wrapping paper tubes (some of those old tubes were pretty darn big, like 3 inches +, wish I could find some like that NOW. The nosecones are drill turned balsa (the minuteman nosecone has several small splits and cracks for some reason) and the paint jobs are rattlecan and testors bottled model paints.

I made custom decals for them by using a very thin drafting paper, drawing out the designs on the drafting desk, and then painting them by hand with model paints and paintbrush, cutting them out with good 'ol Exacto #11, and gluing them on with a bit of white glue. Worked pretty well.

Sorry for the creases in the posterboard transitions and unfilled tube seams but my building skills have improved a lot since then. (I hope)

The SS-17 has 'flown' once, on an A8-3 IIRC; my brother and I were goofing around one time shortly after I built it and we dug a "silo" in the backyard with a post-hole digger, about 6 inches in diameter and about 3 feet deep or so, and pushed the launch rod down into the bottom of the hole, connected the clips and gingerly slid it down in the silo, backed off, and pushed the button. Kinda like those 'cold launcher' tests they did in the USSR and on submarines, it "poofed" out of the hole about 3 feet high and laid over onto the ground.

Both used a 'motor can' of slightly smaller tubing containing the motor mounts, which stuck out the back enough to glue fins onto. I'm using the Minuteman's can on my Ares I project, but from what I read I probably need to cut off the epoxied Plexiglass fins and go with some other clear plastic that's more durable. The SS-17's fin can didn't survive But like Steve Austin it can be rebuilt...

Yall take it easy! OL JR

Great memory I am contemplating a line of ICBM scratchbuilds. I keep hearing a voice saying the Navaho would be cool as well.
Cheers
Fred

Pretty cool find Luke. Thanks for posting them.

Indiana said:

Pretty cool find Luke. Thanks for posting them.

Click to expand...

Thanks! I remember so well because I worked for SO long trying to get enough info to build them. I worked in the library in high school (only 6-1, 200 lb + library aid they ever had Mrs. Lamb loved me though, for two reasons... she said there were a lot fewer late books when I was working for some reason, and we moved from the old typing room at one end of the school into the brand new library they built at the other end, and she was glad to have a strapping farm boy to move all those books and furniture

Anyhow, I had access to TONS of space and military books and plenty of time to make use of them. I figured out from my drafting classes how to derive fairly decent scale data from photographs, so long as they were at the right angles and big enough, and how to compare figures derived from one photo to figures from another and get pretty close to the 'actual' number (remember this was WAY pre-internet days and cold war books with grainy CIA photos were the best I could do). I used to goof with a lot of weird stuff like that in the library and in drafting, because I could knock out a drawing we'd have a week to do in less than an hour and then goof on the old AutoCAD computer we had loaned to us from the junior college nearby, when they replaced their first generation AutoCAD computers for some with a new fangled AutoCAD program running in something called "Windows" (HA-it'll never catch on!) It sucked but it was Buck Rogers stuff to us... if you could memorize all the command lines you had to manually type in to work on your drawing. (I still have nightmares about MS-DOS programming in junior high, thanks to that nice fella Ross Perot who got a law passed here in TX when I was in sixth grade that said that every school student had to have two years of computer classes starting in sixth grade--no matter how primitive the computers were at the time... Thanks Ross)

I remember I also calculated exactly how far those missiles would be capable of travelling and the warhead yields they could deliver, again in scale. IIRC, in scale the SS-17 could deliver 4 scale warheads from my house 45 miles west of downtown Houston to the far side of San Antonio, about 190 miles away, with a total yield of approximately 20 kilotons, in scale, about equal to the Nagasaki device. The Minuteman III could deliver 3 scale warheads just shy of San Antonio, say New Braunfels or so, say about 170 miles away, with a scale yield approximately 15 kilotons, about equal to the Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima. And that's at about 1/150 scale approximately IIRC...

Like I said I did weird stuff... Next time your on a road trip, set small orange and a lemon a couple feet apart 87 miles from your house... that's how far it is in scale to the 12 inch Earth globe in your office back home to Pluto and Charon...

What can I say... unrepentant nerd and proud of it! OL JR

I think you did a great job! Not quite to scale, but pretty close.

wait for it...

The resemblance is "uncanny".

Nice find, Jeff! Do you reckon you'll fly these when we have our launch at
your place?

luke strawalker said:

Here's some pics of the scratchbuilt Soviet SS-17 ICBM and US Minuteman III ICBM that I built close to 20 years ago... just recovered from the attic at Grandma's after she passed away last year...

Hope this works

Click to expand...

Super Kewl Scratch scales from the Good Ol'e Day's! Great looking stuff,

luke strawalker said:

I remember I also calculated exactly how far those missiles would be capable of travelling and the warhead yields they could deliver, again in scale. IIRC, in scale the SS-17 could deliver 4 scale warheads from my house 45 miles west of downtown Houston to the far side of San Antonio, about 190 miles away, with a total yield of approximately 20 kilotons, in scale, about equal to the Nagasaki device. The Minuteman III could deliver 3 scale warheads just shy of San Antonio, say New Braunfels or so, say about 170 miles away, with a scale yield approximately 15 kilotons, about equal to the Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima. And that's at about 1/150 scale approximately IIRC...

Click to expand...

Please try to steer clear of the NE side of San Antonio. My wife is already giving ME enough grief about how MY rockets have turned her decorating scheme inside out. I don't want to have to explain to her about YOUR rockets too...

Seriously, nice job. What kind of stabilization did you use?

dwmzmm said:

Nice find, Jeff! Do you reckon you'll fly these when we have our launch at
your place?

Click to expand...

Probably not yet... Though I might bring them out to the range if anybody wants to see 'em. I have some work to do to the Minuteman to make it flight ready, and I've never even flown it yet so I'd prefer to do that on my own first to make sure it's stable.. I designed and built it back in the good ol' pre-RockSim days and just 'eyeballed' the stability. I built a bunch of scratchies back then and developed a pretty good eye for whether something would be stable or not (til I tried putting a foamie shuttle glider on the side of an 'Air Force' SparrowHawk fantasy scratchie I built out of paper towel tubes and a Bertha nosecone, powered by a C6-5 which was nowhere NEAR enough for it Correction, it was enough for a perfect ballistic flight with an apogee of about 200 feet or so and a perigee of -11 miles, like Ares I)

The SS-17 will have to have a whole new fin can built. After reading a thread on here about the brittleness of Plexi fins, I'm rethinking about fin material that's used on them anyway, which means I'll have to find a source of something other than Plexiglass... any ideas around here?? I'll see if I can post a pic of the fin can in the Minuteman though so yall can see what I'm talking about...

The only thing I have right now that's 'flight ready' is a pair of Maniacs in flourescent orange I dusted off from the old days and refinished/repainted for BoosterVision carriers, when I get around to building the pods and stuff

Too many irons in the fire...

The first pic is the Ares I with the fincan from the Minuteman installed. Amazingly they turned out to be almost identical in size (funny I don't recall having any BT-56 when I built the Minuteman all those years ago; seems like I might have used either a Saran wrap or aluminum foil tube for the Minuteman) but all I needed was a 'shim tube' which I cut from toilet paper tube and glued into the Ares I to center the fin/motor can tube. only about 2 inches or so of the tube/motor pokes out the bottom of the Ares, and when I paint it yellow ala flamefins (thanks Dr. Zooch) with the clear fins it should blend in pretty well.

The second pic is the Minuteman with the fin/motor can installed; the fins butt up against the bottom of the missile.

The third pic is the motor/fin can sitting beside the Minuteman with a D11-9 installed (picked some of those up about 15 years ago at a hobby shop/ electrician's supply house in Wharton, TX... they were SO old the packaging plastic had turned totally yellow How far back do D11-9's date anyway??

Yall take it easy! OL JR

Also thinking about an improved "silo launcher" for them... Need a 3 foot piece of 4 inch PVC pipe, a 4 inch PVC pipe cap, a 4 inch PVC toilet flange, and a card table that my wife wouldn't mind me drilling a 4 inch hole in the top of... she'd probably notice if I used her 'good' card table... Maybe I could keep it hidden til next Christmas and then play dumb.... hmmm...

Nah too much stress at Christmastime anyway... But I'll keep working on it

Later! OL JR

PS. the pics above should explain the stability mechanism... The SS-17 used something similar, but with a longer engine tube that has the centering rings recessed about 3 inches up inside the rocket, and the 'fin can' consisted of an inner body tube that went OVER the engine tube in the rocket, to which the fins were glued, and an OUTER tube that went over the fin edges and fit just inside the main lower body tube, kinda like a coupler. The fins extended out the bottom; all assembled it looked something like the shuttle 'fin pods' that go in the SRB's of the old Estes shuttle kits, except the fin mounts were 'up inside' the bottom of the body tube and couldn't be seen. Unfortunately I tossed what was left of it, because it ended up under some stuff in the attic and was out of round and missing some of the plexi fins. The thing would probably have lost a fin or two on landing, because they stuck out the bottom so far and unsupported, and so I'm thinking of reworking the idea into something more akin to the stabilizing 'fin pods' ala Dr. Zooch's Mercury Atlas, with the 'shuttle like' fin pods, but probably using clear fins. Sorry no pics but the thing ended up in the trash :cry: