Artifacts - Extrapolated Worlds

Der Big Red Max

Doug June 13, 2025

Artifact: Der Big Red Max

Lightly-modified Estes Der Big Red Max mid-power rocket. Vinyl Star Wars markings by Sticker Shock. Balsa fins laminated with printer paper and epoxy, trailing edges reinforced with laminated medical acetate tape. Custom internal baffle in radial pattern – we’ll see how that works out! The body tube was too short to use a standard in-line Aerotech baffle, so I drilled the motor mount tube (stolen from the Great Goblin) with radial holes and wrapped it with a stainless steel pot scrubber, then capped it with a bulkhead with forward-facing vent holes.

Ideological note here: I’ve been a modeler pretty much all my life, like since maybe seven years old, and in all that time I have found German WW2 subjects unpalatable. Because Nazis, right? Fuck those guys. But the extremely popular and legitimately cool Red Max series from Estes is all about that imagery. Skulls, Luftwaffe markers, etc. Which meant it was off-limits for me. Now… Star Wars. Come on folks, the whole Imperial design aesthetic is scraped right out of the Nazi playbook. But with the “one step removed” that science fiction provides it was okay. Kinda. Okay enough that I could make models of T.I.E. fighters. And put Storm Trooper markings on this beast. Which do look kind of cool. Now I guess I need to do a Rebel or Jedi riff on the next one.

Fat Bat

Doug April 13, 2025

Artifact: Fat Bat

This is a highly modified Estes Great Goblin mid-power rocket. The design rationale was to make a rocket that I could fly from the club’s main field – a gravel river bar. This required reversing the fins so the rocket will land on the aft end of its body tube, or along one edge of a fin. The balsa fins are reinforced with printer paper glued with epoxy to both sides, and then a wrap of medical acetate tape laminated to the trailing edges. The strakes are for fun. Inside, I added an Aerotech baffle system to protect the parachute.

It flew flawlessly in March of 2025 from Lake Louise. An Aerotech F26-6J took it to about 1100 feet.

Ventris

Doug March 28, 2025

Artifact: Ventris

I built this Estes Ventris mid-power rocket as marketing collateral for the release of The Extrapolated Man… but then the launch that year was called off due to high winds on Lake Louise. I did get to fly her in March of 2025 on an Aerotech F26-6J. The flight was perfect – a straight-arrow launch to about 1100 feet, clean ejection, good parachute deployment, and a gentle landing in the fresh snow that covered the frozen lake.

The experiment with this model was a baffle between the lower and upper body tubes, made by adding plywood bulkheads to the coupler. My thinking was that the offset holes would be sufficient to keep the ejection gasses from burning the parachute, and I was mostly worried about whether I had enough vent area to get a clean deployment. So… that was the reverse the situation. The deployment was fine, but the ‘chute got burned. What I should have done was dropped a stainless steel pot scrubber in the coupler. Alas. The model will fly with a parachute blanket henceforth!

Orbiter N1706

Doug December 14, 2024

Artifact: Orbital Transport Orbiter N1706 (1/48)

This is a large, radio-controlled rocket glider, built from a kit by Frank Burke’s DynaSoar Rocketry, markings by Sticker Shock. The original Estes Orbital Transport’s orbiter used a BT-20 body tube, and this is a 2.6″ diameter BT-80, so it’s about a 3.5x upscale. Control is via a Spektrum-compatible LemonRX and a pair of servos that actuate the elevons at the aft end of the delta wings.

It flies great on an Aerotech reloadable E6-RCT! The drill is to load the model onto a 1010 launch rail, pointing straight up. The rocket motor is ignited electrically, and the motor fires for 7.1 seconds. The model is docile in boost and glide, and will pretty much fly straight up hands off, but you can maneuver – gently! – under boost if you like. I’d guess it gets up to around 500 feet, where it’s about the size of your fingernail at arm’s length.

Glide performance is not great – maybe a minute or so – but that’s not the point. The point is you are flying a huge radio-controlled version of the absolute classic fan-favorite Orbital Transport!

Introduced in 1969 by Estes, this was an absolute must-have for little Doug. I don’t know how many I built and flew. This was peak moonshot; space was THE THING, and I was thoroughly hooked.

The Super Orbital Transport is a 1.3x upscale presently (4Q 2024) available from Estes. I’ve got it, and am tempted to try and wedge micro RC gear into the orbiter. We’ll see.

Fata Morgana

Doug December 13, 2024

Artifact: Fata Morgana (1/160)

This is a heavily modified “SFX” version of the Estes Protostar, done as the hypership Fata Morgana, with four hyperdrive nodes arranged in a tetrahedron. The uppermost is in a cage between the upper and lower fins while the lower three are in the fin nacelles. Note the fusion laser struts near trailing edge of the main fins. Scale approximately 1/160, to go with most of the Estes offerings, and afford an upscale path to 1/100.

She still needs her markings, another coat of clear acrylic, and then time to fly. Set up for 24mm motors.

Starship Vega

Doug December 12, 2024

Artifact: Starship Vega (1/160)

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!