What is the best selling model rocket kit of all time?

[ArthurAstroCam]

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So, looks like I wasn't that far off.

 

[BEC]

Wife... flying... rocket....
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@neil_w Bringing this back up to follow up on the picture I posted showing my wife with her Carlsbad Cavemen livery Big Bertha: See the May/June 2024 issue of Sport Rocketry for the article this post triggered the writing of.

added: by the way, she is learning her way around Open Rocket and has used it to design several contest models, including the one that beat me in A Altitude at NARAM last year.

 

[BEC]

I know of some folks who have tried....if you're looking to recreate the pictures in catalogs it can be quite the project. If you're interested in physical configuration then the variations can multiply in different ways. The messiest one I can think of is that during the 1989-1992 time frame, Alpha kits were sold with several nose cones: the older blow molded shape, the newer blow-molded shape, and Alpha III nose cones in both red and (very rarely) blue. At the same time the red/black to blue/black livery change was going on. So that's a bunch of permutations right there....

Coming back to this thread also makes me want to fix an error I made here: I meant red/black to red/blue livery transition when i typed that above.

One other thought related to all of this....the Alpha III has been available continuously for 50 years now, and unlike the other two longer running models (Big Bertha, Alpha) its configuration has been essentially unchanged for that entire half century. The Alpha has had three major motor mount changes, the much-discussed nose cones, and two different fin shapes. Big Bertha has had four different nose cones and a variety of motor mount/stuffer tube arrangements (there's at least one thread on that going right now). But an Alpha III sold today is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the first ones sold as K-56 in 1972 except for colors of parts. Pretty amazing, really.

And of course the glaring exception to this is the motor hook. The Alpha III got the finger-tab motor hook along with everything else that used motor hooks during the Beta Series transition. It of course had the "normal" one before that. According to my notes this happened at the same time the Alpha III went from red/white with black markings to orange/black with orange markings in the 1993 catalog. For whatever that's worth....