Semroc’s clone of the Estes Starship Vega, one of my very favorite model rockets. Done up pretty much out-of-the-box, plus a removable nozzle for verisimilitude. I figure is about 1/160 scale. I was getting into Larry Niven about the time I built my last Starship Vega (before my Born Again Rocketeer era, anyway), and I remember puzzling over its design, trying to rationalize it as having some kind of hyperdrive. This was a common pattern for me; give me Star Trek’s Enterprise, and I try to reverse-engineer it into something that somehow makes sense (the warp drive must induce some kind of gravitational field at right angles to the direction of motion, and so forth). 

But this design really does some innate promise; put a hyperdrive node in each of the 3 nacelles, and another in the core, and you’ve got a tetrahedron, which is what you’d need to define a vector in 4-space. And use the fins as radiators for the fusion reactor. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Flown on a B6-4 – snapped the shock cord such that the nose cone came down under the parachute whilst the rest fell. Oddly enough, it settled into a nearly perfect backwards glide. No damage done!