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Should Estes make scale rockets that are not American (or the v2)
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Ez2cDave
Well-Known Member
FWIW, I realize that folks aren't feeling friendly towards Russia right now...I'm one of them! HOWEVER...since it IS historical, I'd like to see what Estes could do if they made a scale Soyuz.
The difference is... Soyuz is not a weapon of war.
The capsule rides on top of an ICBM (R-7) and was used to transport military cosmonauts to dedicated Soviet military space stations (Salyut 2, 3, 5), at least one of which was actually armed with a cannon (Salyut 3).
To be fair to the Soviets (if we must), Gemini rode on top of an ICBM and was proposed to fly as part of a dedicated military space station itself (MOL).
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I watched a video about a Titan missile and the narrator correctly mentioned that the ICBM's were basically space rockets with a warhead on top. While that is a huge oversimplification. . . Mercury Redstone, Gemini Titan. . . probably tons of others I am unaware of.
As a child of the Space Shuttle generation, I had never really thought about that.
Personally, I think models are models and if they are missiles, rockets, space vehicles etc., they are a valid thing to consider producing. I wouldn't necessarily be choosing Russian or North Korean option as a first choice to produce at this stage, but I think many of the historical rockets/missiles would be good subjects. They might be very expensive for a limited market and some people would fine certain options offensive.
I think it is worth considering. Maybe make a series of 2-3 a year called 'historical series' (I'm an engineer, not a marketer. . . ) and present the models with some historical background info in the catalog and on the box.
Sandy.
As a child of the Space Shuttle generation, I had never really thought about that.
Personally, I think models are models and if they are missiles, rockets, space vehicles etc., they are a valid thing to consider producing. I wouldn't necessarily be choosing Russian or North Korean option as a first choice to produce at this stage, but I think many of the historical rockets/missiles would be good subjects. They might be very expensive for a limited market and some people would fine certain options offensive.
I think it is worth considering. Maybe make a series of 2-3 a year called 'historical series' (I'm an engineer, not a marketer. . . ) and present the models with some historical background info in the catalog and on the box.
Sandy.
rharshberger
Well-Known Member
Actually the early Manned rockets were ICBMs with a capsule strapped to them....
I'm vaguely nostalgic for the old liquid-fueld ICBMs with ascent profiles reasonable for human cargo. I also think Gemini would have been even cooler if it had silo launched. 
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@Zbench Yes. I see the point.
Its like I won't buy a B-29 model airplane kit as it was used to murder 10s of 1000s of innocent civilians (and some guilty ones I am sure). And I'll not fly in Boeing airplanes because they made the B-29, and on and on. Let those without sin cast the first stones yes?
As far as Model Rockets? Vote with your dollars (which I think someone already said).
Its like I won't buy a B-29 model airplane kit as it was used to murder 10s of 1000s of innocent civilians (and some guilty ones I am sure). And I'll not fly in Boeing airplanes because they made the B-29, and on and on. Let those without sin cast the first stones yes?
As far as Model Rockets? Vote with your dollars (which I think someone already said).
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You are 100% correct. I flipped the dialog, but yes, they were ICBM's first and human spaceflight second. My mistake is what I wrote, not what was actually in my brain. . .
Sandy.
Jimmy Wilson
Member
I do not believe that would matter to them. They make what will sell the most. Look back through the years at all the awesome kits that were made by Estes that aren't available now. With all the older guys like me getting back into rocketry we all want to relive our youth and a lot are skilled to scratch build some of those kits. The Nike Smoke is one of my favorites, and the first one I had was the Centuri one with the two piece nose cone that was vacu-formed and had to be glued together with tabs inside it. I did buy the Nike Smoke Pro, and the smaller release, along with the Quest models. I turned 65 this year and still have the first rocket I ever bought, an Estes V2. Thirty years ago I dug it out, re-built it and launched it and felt the same excitement as the first time I flew it. I feel Estes is missing the boat by not re-issuing classic kits, if they would monitor e-Bay prices they might see what they are missing out on. It's silly to think consumers can dictate what manufacturers produce and offer for sale. Sales might keep a product offered for a while, but telling them "make this or else" is ridiculous. As far as boycotting a V-2 because of WWII, I just don't get it. I like the way it looks, and don't let what it did influence me.
DAllen
Well-Known Member
The disaster of the N-1 vs. the success of the Saturn V had more to do with funding and politics than the skill of Russian engineers vs. American engineers.
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Would be interesting if Estes or some other model rocket company did make some different countries. rocket model kits. Senn many plastic ones on model pages. Be nice to be is same scale as 1/100.
You don’t say? So if I was designing a rocket to take people to the moon, would I chose a 3 stage rocket with 5 massive engines or a 5 stage rocket with 30 engines, the failure of any one of which could cause it to oscillate and result in destruction of the airframe? Certainly funding and politics played a role, but the design was half baked from the start.
The dead outhouse and dead palm tree were particularly heinous atrocities.
TRF discovers that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. You love to see it.
For what it’s worth, I have about 12 brands I refuse to do business with, even at my own inconvenience, and will dunk on at any opportunity, all for more recent offenses (i.e. within my adult life) that have not been addressed. More than that is difficult to keep track of. Make a reasonable effort by identifying a small number of the most egregious offenders and battling them first. You don’t need to abandon civilization and become a nomadic hermit because you filled your head with archives of immoral acts large and small committed by everyday brands. We need you to help take down the machine.
In the meantime though, can we get a Long March 2F kit? Two-stage with a full complement of boosters would be siiiick.
So your slant is, as long as we have some comic relief, poking fun at dead veterans is ok?
You do you. The DRM is a cool rocket design, I'd just choose to finish it a bit differently:
I interpreted it as taking a jab of wartime German iconography. If you look at the warning decals it’s clear that they’re not real German, they’re just making fun of the German accent and spelling.
Appropriating the look to discredit or mock it is valid.
And these design issues were because of...
wait for it...
*drum roll*
*cymbal crash* POLITICS AND FUNDING!
Unlike NASA, the soviet space program was not a monolithic entity working for a single purpose. Sergei Korolev's design bureau, which was responsible for the N-1, was forced to compete with other design bureaus for funding. Combined with this issue was that the Soviet Union's leadership balked at the price of a manned lunar mission and their support for it was only ever halfhearted. Korolev's design bureau started working on a lunar program much later than Americans started working on Apollo, and they had to do it with only half the funds they said would be needed to accomplish the mission successfully.
There was no money to develop hydrogen-fueled engines that would allow for fewer stages, no money to develop large engines (plus the concerns with combustion instability in large engines made a large cluster a reasonable design decision), and, most importantly, no money to build test stands large enough to test complete N-1 stages so they could blow up hardware on the ground rather than in flight, like we did with many pieces of Saturn V test hardware. The Soviet engineers came up with something that could have worked in spite of all the constraints placed on them, and I applaud them for it and genuinely wish they could have gotten at least one successful flight out of it, but the program was cancelled in the 70's and the remaining N-1's were scrapped.
Finally, your statement that the failure of any one of the first stage engines would cause ocscilations that would destroy the airframe is simply not true. there was a primitive control system specifically intended to keep thrust on all sides of the rocket even, and by the final flight it worked pretty well.
We saw this kind of political interference affect the design and engineering of SLS. This shouldn’t be new to anyone.
Heck, we saw it in the development of the STS. Many more elegant designs were passed over due to cost, the requirement for a large cargo bay was imposed on the program, and we ended up with the kludge that was the Space Shuttle.
I'm sure it's not cheap to ship from Italy, and it's only single-stage, but here you go:
Long March 2F Shenzhou (CZ-3A) - Chinese Launcher
Scale model of the chinese launch vehicle Long March 2F (Chang Zheng 2F), to deliver crews into space.
dr wogz
Fly caster
It can, but is difficult. (and leaves a less than smooth surface)
layers are the weak point
And as we've seen with many kits, as well as with other hobbies & such.. if it isn't perfect out of the package, then it is cheap, worthless, garbage, etc.. (People expect their parts / kits to be 100% perfect, fits of ±.0001" or better, geometric tolerance, etc..)
It can be very difficult to sand small, detail-heavy parts smooth. Big parts are easy.
^^^This is where I'm at with it.^^^
Not a huge deal to sand flat surfaces or even cones, ogives, etc, but the parts that I would be most likely to 3D on a scratch scale model like fine details, escape towers, etc, are a pain to get smooth. You're left with sand, fill, sand, fill, etc, until you're out of tolerance or you've snapped the smaller parts and glued them back together.
Early on in the life of the old "Falcon 9 with Fairing" kit that Space X used to sell, I bought some "beta" detail parts from a vendor who uses 3D printing for production (now fairly well known) and I'll be darned if I didn't give up on mounting the detail parts because removing the layering and contouring the inner surfaces to match the body tube was simply burning through my limited time, elbow grease, and sandpaper. I have since bought my own 3D printer and designing my own parts allows me to reduce the impact of the layering, but it's really not an enjoyable part of the hobby for me.
And that is how we wrap back around to the topic of the thread, which is whether we think Estes should expand it's scale offerings, particularly regarding foreign models. It's easy to toss out, "Make it yourself", but that isn't the point of the OP's topic. A lot of us would love to be able to buy different models from Estes, we aren't demanding that they make what we want, but the topic is about factory offerings and not whether we can make any rocket we want to with scratch building, kit bashing, and 3D printing.
As to the morality rabbit hole, I still consider it hand wringing. If Estes decided to market a scale PG-7, I would buy it in a heartbeat despite having been on the receiving end of at least one. A 100% scale Iranian Haseb 107mm would also be neat as all get out as an Estes scale kit on a 29mm motor, dealt with plenty of those in my life as well. Again, to me, they're objects, not ideologies.
shockie
High Plains Rocketeer
In addition to more scale models, why not produce Upscaled Centuri models for DEF power? They own the IP. What's the problem?
Wikipedia notes:
"First failure, serial 3L
February 21, 1969: serial number 3L – Zond L1S-1 (Soyuz 7K-L1S (Zond-M) modification of Soyuz 7K-L1 "Zond" spacecraft) for Moon flyby.A few seconds into launch, a transient voltage caused the KORD to shut down Engine #12. After this happened, the KORD shut off Engine #24 to maintain symmetrical thrust. At T+6 seconds, pogo oscillation in the #2 engine tore several components off their mounts and started a propellant leak. At T+25 seconds, further vibrations ruptured a fuel line and caused RP-1 to spill into the aft section of the booster. When it came into contact with the leaking gas, a fire started. The fire then burned through wiring in the power supply, causing electrical arcing that was picked up by sensors and interpreted by the KORD as a pressurization problem in the turbopumps. The KORD responded by issuing a general command to shut down the entire first stage at T+68 seconds into launch. This signal was also transmitted up to the second and third stages, "locking" them and preventing a manual ground command from being sent to start their engines. Telemetry also showed that the power generators in the N-1 continued functioning until the impact with the ground at T+183 seconds."
As it relates to the 4th and final launch:
"Fourth failure, serial 7L
November 23, 1972: serial number 7L – regular Soyuz 7K-LOK (Soyuz 7K-LOK No.1) and dummy LK module-spacecraft for Moon flybyThe start and lift-off went well. At T+90 seconds, a programmed shutdown of the core propulsion system (the six center engines) was performed to reduce structural stress on the booster. Because of excessive dynamic loads caused by a hydraulic shock wave when the six engines were shut down abruptly, lines for feeding fuel and oxidizer to the core propulsion system burst and a fire started in the boattail of the booster; in addition, the #4 engine exploded. The first stage broke up starting at T+107 seconds and all telemetry data ceased at T+110 seconds. The launch escape system activated and pulled the Soyuz 7K-LOK to safety. The upper stages were ejected from the stack and crashed into the steppe. An investigation revealed that the abrupt shutdown of the engines led to fluctuations in the fluid columns of the feeder pipes, which ruptured and spilled fuel and oxidizer onto the shut down, but still hot, engines. A failure of the #4 engine turbopump was also suspected. It was believed that the launch could have been salvaged had ground controllers sent a manual command to jettison the first stage and begin second stage burn early as the stage failed only 15 seconds before it was due to separate at T+125 seconds and it had reached the nominal burn time of 110 seconds according to the cyclogram.[58][59][60]"
When I read that, it screams to me, "worked pretty well"
shockie
High Plains Rocketeer
And ICBM's with nuclear warheads on them.
You realize that Von Braun back in 1950 recommended creating a space station in orbit, to shoot nuclear capable rockets at the USSR?
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How late in the 40s? Depending on the timeframe, it could have been during the American nuclear monopoly. Even once their gadget went up they still lacked the material and technical capacity to credibly deliver one.
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