1/5 Scale Nike Hercules

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Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there! Here’s the sustainer primed. You can also see the hatch innards. The nose cone is also primed. Trying to get the first full assembly done tonight. Stay tuned…

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Decided to check CP and CG while it was all together. Simulating a ten pound AT L2200 motor with a 10# dumb bell. The CP is right where the booster connects to the sustainer. 8 pounds of lead shot in the nose should move the CG forward a few calibers.

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Next up: complete the avionics hatch, 3d print the electronics sled, finishing and paint. Trying to complete this by July 1st. I’m thankful to all the people here who have encouraged me during this build over the last six months.
 
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Those were scheduled to fly in 2006 and updated in 2009, but I haven't seen anything lately

Ahh. John Thompson sent it to me and said it was supposed to be coming up in a couple years.
I am starting a 1/2 scale Ajax right now 😁
 

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Looking at the photos of the dry fit. What an amazing project.

Came back to them after getting a cup of coffee. Noticed the lovely back yard, flowering pots, lawn furniture--and had an "Aha" moment. Our wives really do put up with a lot for our nerd hobbies, don't they? Here's to the ladies in our lives. God help you.
 
Revell had a Nike Hercules plastic kit with some unique decals. I did some digging and there is a picture of some real Nike Ajax missiles with these decals on them but no Hercules. I could never find a scan of the decals though to send to Mark @ Stickershock.
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Nose cone weight is applied. Eight pounds of small steel shot. The 1/4” all thread anchors into the slurry and is completed by fastening it to the bulkhead (which is shown loose here, until the slurry cures).
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A bucket of ice water in case the epoxy gets too hot while curing.

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Very nice build. I'm in the process of noodling through a LPR version. You used a boattail on the sustainer but I wonder if you considered actually going with the Sears-Haack shape of the actual second stage? I'm committed to trying to do so although I imagine it's going to be easier in LPR than in your build. Again, though, it looks fantastic.
 
Very nice build. I'm in the process of noodling through a LPR version. You used a boattail on the sustainer but I wonder if you considered actually going with the Sears-Haack shape of the actual second stage? I'm committed to trying to do so although I imagine it's going to be easier in LPR than in your build. Again, though, it looks fantastic.
HI Duncan - thanks for the kind words. The sustainer really does have a boat tail in real life, but it's reliefed deep in the booster interstage shroud. I chose to expose more - and yes that blows scale - because I needed more room for chutes and drogues. There's so little room for that in the booster couple already, that I had to make a choice.
 
You're welcome. You've put a lot of thought and careful work into it. I hope she flies well. And yes - I knew that the tail of the sustainer did continue into the shroud but I was thinking about the curvature. According to at least a couple of sources I've looked at the sustainer is a continuous curve - it's not obvious in most pictures but it's shaped like this:

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The Sears-Haack body.

Or maybe it is. It is REALLY hard to tell from most photos as the white color doesn't show contrasts well and to be honest I don't know for sure if the middle portion is definitely still a continuous curve although if it is it would be so slight as to be a "modified" Sears-Haack? But if you look at these it's a little easier to tell:

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And honestly I am kicking myself on this one - there's a static display only 30 miles from me that I've been to innumerable times and I simply did not look closely at the Hercules. https://hampton.gov/facilities/facility/details/Air-Power-Park-23.
Here's the posted info on it at Air Power Park:
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In that information it looks maybe linear in the middle portion....??? But I've also seen technical drawings where the central body is in fact not curved and the tail does appear to be a boattail.

So I'm not entirely sure. Next time I'm at Air Power Park I'm going to take a closer look.

That all being said, it is also possible that there were a couple of variations on the Hercules (it seems like that happened a lot during this time period, especially with the Nike project fitting pieces and parts from one to another) and some are truly Sears-Haack bodied and some are not.

Either way, it sure is a nice build you've got going on. Hope to see video of its flight.
 
You're welcome. You've put a lot of thought and careful work into it. I hope she flies well. And yes - I knew that the tail of the sustainer did continue into the shroud but I was thinking about the curvature. According to at least a couple of sources I've looked at the sustainer is a continuous curve - it's not obvious in most pictures but it's shaped like this:

View attachment 533983
The Sears-Haack body.

Or maybe it is. It is REALLY hard to tell from most photos as the white color doesn't show contrasts well and to be honest I don't know for sure if the middle portion is definitely still a continuous curve although if it is it would be so slight as to be a "modified" Sears-Haack? But if you look at these it's a little easier to tell:

View attachment 533986

And honestly I am kicking myself on this one - there's a static display only 30 miles from me that I've been to innumerable times and I simply did not look closely at the Hercules. https://hampton.gov/facilities/facility/details/Air-Power-Park-23.
Here's the posted info on it at Air Power Park:
View attachment 533988

In that information it looks maybe linear in the middle portion....??? But I've also seen technical drawings where the central body is in fact not curved and the tail does appear to be a boattail.

So I'm not entirely sure. Next time I'm at Air Power Park I'm going to take a closer look.

That all being said, it is also possible that there were a couple of variations on the Hercules (it seems like that happened a lot during this time period, especially with the Nike project fitting pieces and parts from one to another) and some are truly Sears-Haack bodied and some are not.

Either way, it sure is a nice build you've got going on. Hope to see video of its flight.
Aaaand then I found this....... https://aviation.stackexchange.com/...ated-sears-haack-body-change-with-a-cylindric
 
Hey Duncan - while it may be true that the sustainer is truly a Sears-Haack body, my experience building this Nike Hercules is that getting to true scale is about twice as expensive as Sport Scale. Unless you are 3D Printing the fuselage, I can't imagine the cost of that structure being cheaper than a three-body surface like what I did, Wedge Oldham did and @dbpierce did.
The lesson I learned is SCALE = EXPENSIVE. There are a number of other cons with SCALE too - like the chutes and drogues, but money runs out fast on something like this.
I wish you the very best.
 
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