Shrox Kits

[DavidQ]

Over on the Yorf site is an old thread which I just encountered last September, called "Some forgotten Shrox kits". Since I was in the mood for another thematic build, I decided to build them. All of them. Every on on the list, and others that I could find.

So I did.

Some were easy to build, since Apogee included the plans in their newsletters, and has (or at least had) the dimensions and decals.

Others could be inferred from Rocksim files that were released, although I needed to draw and print the decals myself.

Others could be inferred from plan drawings released by Shrox, with top, side, and end views. With some reasoning about the parts sizes, the drawings could be scaled and kits made, once decals were drawn.

The hardest were extrapolated from photos or projection drawings. For those, some mathematics and some assumptions were made, so that I could reverse engineer the dimensions.

Of course, some reverse engineered kits may be off by a fraction of in inch in some places. Others that only had crude images available (like the black-and white pixellated image of the Quantum Boom I have) may be quite a bit off. But, I feel that the results are representative of the Shrox designs.

I did not build the recently announced kits, which Shrox announced at the end of 2012. Sure, those kits could be reverse engineered from the pictures, but I'd rather buy them from him, and then clone them from the kits I purchased. That's what I did with the currently available kits from Dynstar, Flis, and Quest. I bought them and cloned them - except for the Quest kits, which I bought and built beause they have too much white in their decals.

I'll not release any of the plans I created or the Rocksim files, since most of those kits were commercial, and might still become such. Besides, I like Shrox's designs and don't want to undercut his work.

The list of the Shrox kits I built and will be publishing pictures of, not including the gliders, is:
Aerospace One, Quest
Aerospace One Fighter Escort, Quest
Alien8, Flis
Alien8, Shrox
Aries
Bolaero Z
Capricorn (variant of Icarus)
Daedelus (variant of Icarus)
Dart
DC Sam
Demon Squid
Der Rammstein
DynasoarX
Europa Probe
Federation
Firefox, Shrox
Firefox, Dynastar
Harrier
Helios
Hyperion
Icarus
Javelin
Lancer (variant of Stiletto)
LexxJet, Dynastar
Mars Plymouth
Oberth
Orion, Apogee
Orion, Shrox
Orion Transport, Dynastar
Quantum Boom
Ripley
Sarah Conner
Scram Cat
Sea Zipper
Sea-Snake
SHX-15
SHX-15B
SHX-15D Delta
SHX Star shuttle
SHX-21 Rocket Plane
SHX-24B w/ booster
SHX-3
SHX-3, midpower
Snarky, Dynastar
Snipet
Solarkron
Space Alpha One
Star 01
Stiletto, shrox
Stiletto, Quest
Stonebreaker AX
Stonebreaker, Dynastar
SHX-10 Navaho
Tritip
TVM-01
Twoner
Undercutter
Vipox
XF-45

Edit: I haven't launched any of these yet. Too cold and wet for me to go out with my rockets.

 

[DavidQ]

Do you hate this rocket, or do you have this rocket? Only Rammstein knows for sure.

Except, I know that I've got a home built version of this rocket. And, I surely do not hate it.View attachment 114373

Its also a rear eject, for that smooooth feel at the nose cone. It's a BT-70 size, so yet again, I'll be using them mid-power engines. I need to find a better launch site with more acreage and fewer trees. Anyone in the Vancouver region of Washington state and have a secret launch facility that could be shared?

It was built from this design.
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I had to extrapolate this one, but even with possible variances, I'm really happy with it.

 

[DavidQ]

Last one for tonight. The Undercutter XT - one cool looking design that I'm sure will be a rewarding challenge for stability.

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I wasn't really sure how the various pieces fit together from the illustration, but luckily this was tackled by EchoVictor, and he posted as build thread. I give him thanks for the guidance in his post.

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This rocket had lots and lots of white decals, which are hard to make at home. I had tried making white decals by cutting them out of white decal paper on the Hyperion, but that was too tedious. This time, I cut them out of adhesive vinyl using my laser cutter. By putting a front piece of tape on them to transfer them to the rocket, positioning was much, much easier.

Again, a rear-eject rocket. I read comments about the chute getting tangled in the front forks, and I like the seamless look, so avoided making it a front loader.

 

[DavidQ]

WHAT!!!

The whole point of that one is the angle cut fuselage! I'm sorry, but this is a serious infraction, I may have to recommend you be restricted to 18mm....

Well, OK. You're not restricted to 18mm.

But, but, but...

OK, I'll launch it with the few 10.5mm's I've got left over. It'll take a few. Maybe, I'll have to add a few MMX engines as boosters.

However, was that rocket in the Shrox Midpower Rockets illustration an early design for a Firefox? Or, was it another design, which goes by a different name? I've got decals of the names of the rockets on all the kits, so I can identify them. I'd change it if appropriate. And, I've got all of them labelled as Shrox designs, with either "Shrox" or "Shrox Reverse Engineered", to give proper credit (or lack of in the event that good enough for clone really wasn't). If they were made by a company, the rockets get that logo as well.

Here, for instance, is the label on the mystery mid power rocket.
View attachment 114727

As for the one that I'm sure is a Firefox - meaning because the photo on the package I purchased from Apogee showed me that it was - that cut fuselage really does catch the eye of people who come over and see my collection. Maybe I'll take the Shrox label off, and make my own instead....

 

[DavidQ]

We've passed the halfway point, and tonight some of the regular, and some of the more exotic, Shrox rockets from the build spree will be included

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I've only seen one image of the DynasoarX. Luckily it had length and diameter, so I could get a good feel for the dimensions of it. However, my guess on the dimensions of the font was a bit off, and the text I printed ended up being loud and proud.

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[DavidQ]

The Harrier is a pretty cool rocket with two body tubes. I fashioned them with a single engine that is ducted up one of the tubes, so that one nose cone ejects. The other is fastened in place.

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This is one that requires weight in the nose, at least according to Rocksim. It's because of the big wings that are pretty central to the body tube. Luckily, since I cast my own nose cones, they were already pretty heavy - about 16 grams each - so I didn't need to add much more weight.

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[DavidQ]

This is getting into the ping-pong and CD-style rockets. I suspect that it is also inspired by some science fictiony show, which may have had a similar element of a short cylindrical part on its space ship.

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I didn't use a real CD, but instead made the disk from basswood. I only had this small illustration to go from, but luckily it had the color scheme. I extrapolated the diameter from the ping-pong size, and the length from what I expected the nose cone to be made from.

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[DavidQ]

The SHX Ripley is a big rocket ofthe bunch, standing almost 5 feet tall. I see it as having an interesting deep space submarine appearance to it.

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I had to guess the dimensions of this, since I only had this image of it.

I couldn't identify an exact match for the three upper nose cones, but I was pretty confident that the cone inside of those was a 60AH. This decided that the tubes would be BT60's, and from that, I could extrapolate a scale.

It's front eject, since I was worried that the points I added to the tips of the nose cones would be fragile, and a 24mm mount inside of a BT60 doesn't leave a lot of room for a large parachute.

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As long as there are no Giger-style aliens in it, it should be ready to launch.

 

[DavidQ]

To raise the question of who's the better defender between Ripley and Sarah Conner, this is Shrox' Sarah Conner rocket.

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I like how this rocket integrates a disk right in the center, and has a pretty stubby appearance. It looks much more like a space ship would look than it does a rocket, at least in my imaginary world.

When I rocksimmed it, it looked like it would b a bit unstable, again because of the big fin in the middle, i.e. the disk. So, just to get a bit of stability, I stretched the rocket an inch or two over my estimate of the illustration's length. I might have been overly cautious, but it's good enough for clone work.

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[DavidQ]

Do you have any ping-pong balls? Lots of them? Then get more, and build this.

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Twenty-one ping pong balls, in fact.

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This one is a nice partner to the Solarkron, so keep reading.

 

[DavidQ]

The Solarkron is liked in many comments on the web, and has caught the eye of several people that have seem my growing collection.

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Now, I know that some people on this site like to build garbage rockets, i.e. rockets made from discarded materials. That ring at the bottom was once an oats box. Actually, it was several parts, since even an oats box wasn't large enough for that ring, so I had to splice several pieces together to get the right size.

Based on the ping-pong ball in the middle, you can gauge the size. With the blue panels, it goes well with the Mars Plymouth above.

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[DavidQ]

If the Shrox design for the Quest Aerospace one is a modern rocket to get the President safely into space, the Space Alpha One was likely a Reagan-era rocket for the same purpose.

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Sometimes the complex are easy, and the not complex become the not easy. As it was with this rocket. I laid it out, and guessed that the break between the nose and the body tube was at one place. This decision drove the dimensions of the body tube. But, as I built the rocket with that assumption, made it kinda short. It just didn't look right to me. When I later went back to the image to figure out why, I noticed that bit on the right side of the image. The part that says "Length: 1ft. 11.5in." Oops. I didn't even see that section of the image when I had it scaled up on screen to do the dimensional analysis.

So, I got to make this one twice! Once short and squat as a "pilot project". The second as the real deal.

View attachment 114867​

 

[DavidQ]

Or Star 01 - I just had a file name to go by.

Star and Aries - see next rocket - have similar fonts and features, so I'm guessing are part of a space fleet that Shrox was building. Which, I suspect, could be resurrected into a commercially available model space fleet.

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The Star rocket takes several nose cones, which I made from my molds with polyurethane plastic. As a result, I suspect the back end of the rocket was heavier than intended. But, it has gobs and gobs of fin area, so after rocksimming the design, and taking into account the additional nose cones at the from end of the rocket (5 in the front), I don't expect any balancing problems.

As an additional experiment, I painted this rocket and Aries with Krylon Satin metallic Nickel paint. I had used it on other rockets, and it was a golden hue, and not silvery, which I didn't like. So, on Star, I used a base coat of flat white (flat, because of a mistaken purchasing decision when gloss was intended). With this, I did get a nice satin silvery result, as I was expecting from a paint called "Nickel".

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[DavidQ]

A rocket with two horns that is ram tough? Aries, of course.

This another of the NSA fleet Shrox was designing.

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No, that's not a syrofoam cup for a nose, although it might have been if Jim Flis designed this rocket.
Instead, it's a couple transitions I assembled from cardstock, and coated with a thin layer of epoxy.

As I mentioned above, this rocket is painted in Krylon satin metallic Nickel paint as part of an experiment. I had been getting a golden hue with this paint with the gray primer that I'd been using. Instead of a white undercoat, like I used on Star, for this rocket I used an undercoat of glossy black. It did not make the paint appear more silvery, and did keep it with a golden hue. But, the undercoat did help with the smooth finish.

As a note, when I used Rustoleum Nickel paint on other rockets, I did not get the goldish hue. That paint always gave a nice satiny silvery finish.

These decals, like the other rockets in the NSA fleet, has red outlined letters laid over blank white decals which had been cut out on my laser cutter.

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[DavidQ]

A rocket powered satellite, possibly an anti-satellite satellite, or possibly an anti-(anti-satellite) satellite, or possibly just a satellite for probing things, like alien assteroids. Take that evil grays!

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The engine bell is a big transition cut from cardstock, and reinforced with three different sizes rings inside. The antennae are 1/8" carbon fiber rod, so as to not accidentally pull the weight backwards, and to have a lot of give when it lands.

The big fat rod in the middle is not part of the rocket. I needed to hold it for the photo, and haven't equipped this rocket with a hover attachment yet.

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[DavidQ]

I almost didn't build this rocket. I stared and stared at the grainy black and white image, and could not figure how the fins were to go.

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Obviously, it's a picture of a rocket with fins, but that small and without color, the signal wasn't being pulled from the noise, at least with my eyes.

So, I asked my wife to look at it, even though her eyes are worse than mine. I was hoping for a naivity that could give a different insight. Which I got!

Here suggestion was to view the upper fin-like pixels as not being symmetric to other fin-like pixels. But, instead, to view those pixels as their own fin, and the other fin-like pixels as going in different directions. The two sets of fin-like pixels on either side of that set of cylinder-like pixels were the symmetric fins, I decided.

So, whether I got it right or not, I at least created a rocket that if you drink a half bottle of Glenlivet, Glenfiddich, or anything else that starts with Glen, and then squint enough, it will look like the pixellated black-and-white image of a Quantum Boom

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[DavidQ]

The ScramCat is a cool scramjet styled rocket.

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[DavidQ]

View attachment 115038
This is a pretty basic 4FNC type rocket, but it has quite a punch, being launced with 24mm engines. (not motors. or ambulators. or reactionators.)

I'll start this one with a 24mm C engine, just to see whether I lose it or not.

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[DavidQ]

A sister/brother/aunt/uncle/some relation to the Harrier.

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It's got the same evil grimace as the Harrier.

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[DavidQ]

Merry Squidmas! Our cephalopod overlords are approaching to conquer us quad-limbed air breaters.

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With a pair of suckers that just happen to look like cooking spoons, and an eye section that just happens to look like a ping-pong ball. But, it must just be a coincidence, because Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development is just speculated about in the documentaries of the future, known as the Star Trek series and movies.

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[DavidQ]

A shuttle system for a sleeker, more attractive, space administration that wasn't obsessed wtih designing bricks into orbital space ships.

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Is it a boost glider, or a single rocket?

Not a boost glider for me.

I once spent some time trying airplanes - RC, line guided, balsa with tissue paper. I was never happy with my results. So I don't do airplanes, hardly ever. If I can make it a single rocket, I'll do it, unless I don't really care about getting it back. Or, unless there's no choice, like with the Centuri Mach 10.

This one is a rocket. A single rocket. Someone else could try it as a booster and a glider.

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[DavidQ]

YABAGIKT - Yet another booster and glider that I kept together.

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This kit could have been two - a booster with a glider, and possibly an SHX-24B that launched by itsself. But, I went with the pair. And glued them together. So they'd fly as one, and I'd not lose the glider due to my ineptitude with airplanes.

The glider is basically just folded cardstock, on a basswood base.

Those silvery bands on the side boosters are adhesive Monokote. It was one of the first times I used Monokote on my rockets. I've got to say, I'm really happy with it. I used it a few times as the backing to windshields on some of the rockets, to get a more reflective/glassy look. I also used it with my laser cutter, to get some die-cut type results for lettering.

View attachment 115049​

 

[DavidQ]

I went back and forth on building this one. It looks like a conceptual illustration of what would have been on the SHX-21 booster, and may not have been actually intended to be a model rocket.

But, I figured, if I built it, I'd have built another rocket. And had another rocket to launch.

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See where the engine is located? It's on the underbelly. Which would result in a thrust vector that's not through the center of gravity. Which could make for an exciting launch.

To counter that, I played with the dihedral of the wings. My understanding is that if the wings are in a dihedral, the rocket will tend to arc into the dihedral. IIRC, this is partly why the Cylon was never released by Estes - the curve of the body formed a dihedral which would cause the flight to not be straight and true.

So, my hope is that the downward dihedral of the wings will tend to counter the off-axis thrust of the engine, resulting in a stable, even if slightly arcing, flight.

Also, to make sure that there wouldn't be too much thrust, this is the only Shrox design that I made to use 13mm engines. It should get to about 200 feet, like the goonies that I build for A10-4T engines do.

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[DavidQ]

Not the name of a Shrox designed rocket that I know of, but an announcement that we'v e reached the end of the trail.

Here's the family photo. It's too big to fit into a single photo, so I had to take 4 shots to get them all.
View attachment 115060View attachment 115061View attachment 115062View attachment 115063

Above them all is the 2001 Discovery card model I made, with plans to launch. But, it was simply too frail the way I built it, so it is now wall art.

As for the Shrox rockets, I had to add shelves into my mancave (tv and hobby room) just to hold all of them. It's almost 60 rockets, some pretty big.

I'll save some room in case Shrox starts making more. I'll even add shelves if needed.

As the French say when they are assembling the back end of their rockets....

Fin

 

[Fishhead]

Impressive collection. Chan Stevens built several of the available Apogee birds several years back. The Star Shuttle was lethal, awesome looking, but that big pointed nose cone could have put your eye out, kid.

 

[Rocketteer]

Anyone have any Shrox plans they want to share?
Looking specifically for the Stiletto but I'm interested in any.
I know what apogee has available.
Thanks