Since the thread has been bumped and I didn't post in it before...
First off, VERY glad to see the 1/45 Little Joe-II coming out soon, an improvement over the Centuri kit, and about 40 years since the Centuri one went OOP.
And the new BT-60 Honest John, have two of those, one of which is a Christmas present for a 4 year old rocketeer who will turn 5 in 2 months....(I have a pic of him posing with a real Honest John at a museum last summer, that pic will be included with the present to remind him this is a model of that same rocket)
Thank you for the update John! Glad to hear more scale is coming since that's my thing..About RC gliders, would love to see a nice Space Shuttle full stack kit with RC orbiter, similar to what Sheri's Hot rockets produced briefly. I know that's just a pipe dream and would probably not work for Estes but since everyone else here is posting their fantasy I figured I'd just pile on. I fly the Estes 1284 Shuttle stack and have often thought how nice it would be if you could control the descent of the orbiter.
I think it has to be an either-or for a potential Estes shuttle kit, either an R/C orbiter by itself, probably as a parasite, or a bigger full stack. The number of potential customers for an R/C orbiter is a lot smaller than the number of potential customers for a Free Flight shuttle stack. Unless the "toy factor" came into play, the new Star Wars R/C X-wing looks like a lemon, and the Millennium Falcon multicopter is a novelty that does not fly very well either.
I like to daydream that in an alternate universe where Centuri stayed independent of Estes, maintained its quality for scale models, and was still around, that Centuri would have produced a nice Shuttle kit. Something bigger than the Estes one (1/100 would be a natural to go along side their 1/100 Saturns, but then would certainly need to use clustering). The Estes shuttle stack was just too small and many people are surprised to learn I never built the Estes one (Mary Roberts called me once asking if I'd like to build a couple for Estes to display at some sort of event that included Sally Ride). But that is part of what drove me to build my own, the Estes one was too small (the stack boosted poorly, often pitching over. And the orbiter rarely glided, it was so heavy for its size and so tricky).
A nice scale would be about 1/110, BT-55 SRB's, using a 3.0" ET tube. The Guillow's (formerly North Pacific) styrofoam orbiter is close enough to be a semi-scale match, and it glides pretty nicely for an orbiter. Enterprising fliers can convert it for R/C, rudder-only would be good enough.
At one time, I was working up a kit prototype based on those parts. But... it never happened. I still have the prototype, one of these days I'll finally convert the orbiter to rudder-only R/C
https://www.rocketryforum.com/showthread.php?8053-1-110-Scale-Shuttle-model-is-a-success!
Anyway..... it would be nice if SOMEBODY made a shuttle kit in the 1/100 to 1/110 scale range, and Estes would do it best if they could justify it. Something bigger than the original Estes one. But not so big as to make it a very high priced kit needing very expensive engines. The NCR 1/72 shuttle was on the verge of 3.3 pounds and even on a G did not fly very well. And the Sheri's kit was even worse in that regard. My 1/72 shuttles were lighter but were not very suited for non-experts to build to fly properly.
Image below, the 1/110 prototype with BT-55 SRB's, 3" ET & Guillow's orbiter. And below that, a 1/110 shuttle stack I built in 1979 (over 36 years ago), with an orbiter built up using 1/32" balsa skins for the fuselage and 1/16" balsa wings/rudder. That pic was at NARAM-21 held at JSC.
- George Gassaway
