2001 Space Odyssey XD-1 Discovery

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BigMacDaddy

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Way in the back of my mind I had been thinking of trying to make an XD-1 Discovery from the movie 2001 Space Odyssey. The 3D designs are out there so I would have a big head start. The model comes in at around 115 cm or so without rescaling it (not sure how heavy but it will likely need quite a few newtons to get off the ground). https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:950664

Looking for ideas for how I could maybe make this work...

1639535937489.png

A couple of things are tripping me up:

1) No fins (although decent amount of drag)
-- I was assuming I could use clear fins that could be attached for launch (should be possible to hide mounts in the complex details of body).

2) Body is really thin (no room for a body tube)
-- Easiest is probably to eject the whole stem and nose and hide parachute(s) in the rear body next to engine tubes. I also considered connecting a piston to a fiberglass rod that would slide inside a narrow tube. Outer tube would have details mounted to it and piston would shift inner rod forward and pop off the sphere nose cone. I also experimented with modifying the body pods so they can be mounted on a BT-50 tube but it seemed to mess with the look too much.

3) Engines are really thin (no room to put Rocket engines)
-- I spent time mocking up and playing around with options for the engine mounts. Basically looking to distort existing designs to work with Estes engines (13, 18, or 24mm). This is where I have spent the most time. Left version is original design (does not work, but is for comparison), 2nd is made fatter to incorporate 3x 18mm engines, 3rd design includes 1x 24mm mount (keeps original design and attempts to hide engine in middle), 4th includes 2x 18mm engine mounts (allows me to recreate look a bit more than the 3 engine version). Any votes on which one looks better?

1639535963704.png

Mini engines are also kinda big compared to the model but it would be cool to get 6x mini engines in there...
1639534966594.png

Not sure how heavy this will wind up being but max lift for various combos of engines:
2x C5-3 = 454
1x E12-4 = 482
6x A10-3T = 510
3x C5-3 = 681
2x D12-3 = 792
 
Maybe fall-away strap-on boosters? It wouldn’t look as prototypical but that might make enough thrust to get it stable - the boosters could even have fins rather than doing the detachable clear thing…
 
You seem committed to a particular size. Would you consider scaling it up? That might solve two problems at once. For one, you could scale it to take three 18 mm engines in the authentic three tubes. Or scale up more for the 24 mm engines, but maybe that's a bit much.

Second, you could have room for a central tube. It might still be rather skinny, so perhaps Blue Tube would be a good; on the other hand, that's heavy, so maybe a good idea, maybe not.

My other thought, independant of scale, is that you might put the parachute in the spherical nose, and deploy by splitting the spere in half.
 
You seem committed to a particular size. Would you consider scaling it up? That might solve two problems at once. For one, you could scale it to take three 18 mm engines in the authentic three tubes. Or scale up more for the 24 mm engines, but maybe that's a bit much.

Second, you could have room for a central tube. It might still be rather skinny, so perhaps Blue Tube would be a good; on the other hand, that's heavy, so maybe a good idea, maybe not.

My other thought, independent of scale, is that you might put the parachute in the spherical nose, and deploy by splitting the sphere in half.

Good point -- I could scale up to make things look better.

I am worried about weight and overall size. Even at the current scale this is over 115 cm long and apparently weighs around 1300 grams (although this was just based on 90 hours of printing and approximate print volume per hour so no one weighed one for me) << if it weighs this much it is not going to work, would need 6x E-engines or something. I would try to minimize the inside fill / elements to make things a little lighter where possible but not sure this is viable if that weight is accurate. I am hoping someone can give me an actual weight of the model as built.

I will try to find the design variation I did with a BT-50 tube as core. I did originally make the nose cone into a split sphere (originally was going to use for my space station but decided to change that and save this nose for this model).

1640826014374.jpeg
 
I've used that concept for a sci-fi design of my own (as yet unbuild). It't also got an aft drive section and a forward crew section, separated by a long boom, with thermal radiating panels on the drive section that also, just coincidentally ;), give aerodynamic stability.
 
Now that is interesting... I have not done one that way so could be interesting / motivating...

Here is how 4x 18mm and 4x 24mm engines fit in that nose...

View attachment 497797
Some Greebles on the motor tubes will hide them good enough the normies mite not even notice. Combo plugged tractors with a three motor cluster in the back? Power and nose weight rule! Eject open the pod bay doors to deploy recovery gear? OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS HAL! So many cool options.
 
If it uses the tractor cluster and aft cluster, then the tractors could be 13 mm and just give some help with takeoff speed. A10 is a nice engine for that.
 
If it uses the tractor cluster and aft cluster, then the tractors could be 13 mm and just give some help with takeoff speed. A10 is a nice engine for that.

How do you avoid the tractor engines pulling the rocket apart (like how do you keep things together till after the ejection charge goes off)?
 
Glue. ;)

OK, seriously, whatever the tractors are attached to needs to be secured to some kind of "core" of the rocket while something else comes apart to deploy the parachute. There must be a lot of ways to skin that cat.

Possibly, a break with sheer pins. I guess they'd have to be weak, skinny ones to break with a BP engine's ejection charge.
 
People are probably getting tired of this, but this solves many of your problems
Hiding your fins in plain sight-- 240 Calories of Fun | The Rocketry Forum

Unfortunately, the optimal orientation for displace is with long axis horizontal rather than vertical (kind of like the Space 1999 Eagle), but it will still work, and you can put any motor or combo of motors you want inside the ring. The next challenge then becomes room for adequate parachute(s), but might be able to rig a baffle since you have so much tubing, and then just pop the forward hemisphere off the nose, with the chute packed inside the sphere.

Anyway, a neat project. I wish you the best!
 
Went back to check BT-50 center tube and it really kills the narrow space-iness of the original model...

1641181586329.png

I did upscale the pods a fair amount so that they would not look too tiny next to that body tube... Here is what they would look like -- original sized on top, upscaled on bottom...

1641181697181.png
 
Went back to check BT-50 center tube and it really kills the narrow space-iness of the original model...

View attachment 498138

I did upscale the pods a fair amount so that they would not look too tiny next to that body tube... Here is what they would look like -- original sized on top, upscaled on bottom...

View attachment 498139
The art is hiding the model rocket bits while still making it look good.
 
Went back to check BT-50 center tube and it really kills the narrow space-iness of the original model...

View attachment 498138

I did upscale the pods a fair amount so that they would not look too tiny next to that body tube... Here is what they would look like -- original sized on top, upscaled on bottom...

View attachment 498139
So why BT-50? Why not BT-20 or even BT-5? You might be able to get heavy wall tube, or make it if you have to.
 
So why BT-50? Why not BT-20 or even BT-5? You might be able to get heavy wall tube, or make it if you have to.

I would likely use a fiberglass rod or something else more rigid (maybe thick wall cardboard tube if it can be strong enough)... With the BT-50, I was just checking to see if it might be possible to use a body tube large enough to carry an ejection charge through the length of rocket.
 
Instead of BT-50, carbon fiber tubes 1 m long are widely available on eBay, Amazon, etc., at very reasonable prices. Carbon fiber is pretty rigid.
 
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