In a recent comment, Naoto Kimura found a Starship Excalibur variant on an old Model Rocket News cover from August 1968.
I have seen this cover before but never associated it with the Excalibur.
That is definitely the Starship Excalibur with three added SRBs.
No, I'm not going to add this to the build.
Aww,C'mon Let's see a build.
ReplyDeleteI used to have an original copy of that MRn, but all that stuff got sold when I left the hobby back in the early 80's. Wish I had it all back....
Those might not be solid-fuel but perhaps liquid fueled -- the coloring and markings are similar to a Titan rocket -- though nozzle configuration would seem to suggest a very large solid. (okay, I'm reading a *lot more* into the picture than was intended...)
ReplyDeleteIn any case it does look pretty interesting. I'd say it's a lot more plausible to have the Starship Excelsior being launched with strap-on rockets (be it solid or liquid fuel) than the DY-100 (S.S. Botany Bay from Star Trek -- the ship that Khan and his fellow eugenic supermen made their escape after being defeated in the Eugenics Wars) being launched using a whole bunch of SRBs strapped to it (though the launch configuration looks vaguely like the OTRAG [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRAG ] ).
Speaking of an Estes model kit that looks pretty neat with a big rocket booster... From the page from the instructions for the Interceptor
ReplyDeletehttp://www.spacemodeling.org/JimZ/estes/k-50f.tif
reminiscent of the Zero Length Launch idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-length_launch