An apparently vintage 1/96 scale Saturn V display model on ebay, apparently built at the NASA-MSFC model shop back in the day. Just a smidge above my pay grade at a Buy It Now price of 20 large. I’ve seen thespiffy, to say the least.se in museums…
Another ebay auction presents a display model of a transport version of the McD Model 260 VTOL from the 1970’s:
A great many Model 260 variants were designed, all based on the same basic concept: an aircraft shaped much like a corporate jet, featuring a pair of turbofan engines of very high bypass ratio located in shrouds which could unfold to direct the thrust downward for vertical lift and hover. Unlike the Rockwell XFV-12, the Model 260 could probably have worked, but it was never built.
A recent ebay auction was for a display model of the early 1970’s McDonnell-Douglas Incremental Growth Vehicle. This was a proposed manned hypersonic “X-Plane,” designed from the ground up to be capable of having major components replaced. This would allow a simple rocket vehicle to be tested first, and then the fuselage could stretch, or new rocket engines tested, or new wings, or new wings, a fuselage stretch and airbreathing engines, whatever the experiment called for.
This very, very impressive-looking display model was auctioned off way back in 2008:
I much prefer this sort of display to even the most detailed computer rendering printed out onto foam core. Perhaps as 3D printing gets better & cheaper we’ll see a return to this sort of thing. Imagine if you could print off aluminum & plexi large-size models like this for a few bucks worth of raw materials and electricity…
Long time since progress shots were shown. So, enjoy.
A wind tunnel model of the Saturn I, checking specifically for base heating (i.e. heating of the base of the vehicle, between the engines, due to radiant heat from the plumes and convection/conduction from hot exhaust gases recirculating between the engines). This model is odd in that it depicts the clustered booster stage as a straight cylinder; further, there appears to be at least one long fairing up the side (although that could be an artifact of reflections & shadows). I suspect this *may* be a repurposed Atlas model.
Still plugging away at this. The forward “Shuttle” is just about done… some tinkering in the bay and with the forward landing gear, and it’ll be there. At 1/200 scale, the landing gear components are really small, so the decision has been made to mold this with the landing gear fixed in the stowed position, tucked up against the main body. It would look spiffy as a stand-alone kit at 1/72 scale, but I doubt there’s a market for that.
Here’s how Space Station V can service an Orion and an Aries simultaneously. The manipulators arm that reaches out from the Station and grabs the Aries has to be not only nimble, but pretty strong; the boarding deck is under 0.02 G’s. Not a whole lot, but for a vehicle massing (handwave) a hundred thousand pounds, it’s a fair weight to be cantilevered out like that. The arm grasps of one the landing legs, roughly swings the ship into position, and then an arm from the “top” of the lander projects and grabs an extendable structure that projects from the bay. This second arm stabilizes the lander and precisely orients it for the dock that projects from the face of the station and fits over the boarding door. A third, smaller arm snakes out from the lander and mates with the extendable structure. Both of the landers arms contain umbilicals to transfer consumables and propellants and such.
Why not dock it in the bay?
The Aries does not fit in the bay. It just doesn’t. Parsecs are not a unit of time and the Aries Ib doesn’t fit in the Space Station V docking bay. And even if you scale up the SSV so that the Aries does fit… you won’t be able to service both an Aries and an Orion at the same time unless the station is so vast that you’ve got room to move a ship in, then shove it over to one side of the bay and bring in another along the centerline.
At the Hill Aerospace Museum, an unrestored old Titan IIIc display model. Provenance unknown.
It looks glorious:
Presented for the first time in a large-scale format, this intricately detailed Aliens APC model is in glorious 1:18 scale, measuring a very impressive 20-inches long! Using the original blueprints as reference, no detail has been spared making this the most accurate recreation possible. The Aliens M577 Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) features moveable gun turrets and rotating wheels, and is authentically weathered for added realism. It is complete with a separate Aliens-themed display base, designed to replicate the floor tiles of the Sulaco. This museum quality scale model is constructed from heavyweight polystone and then hand painted to the finest detail, and limited to 1,000 pieces worldwide.
“Polystone” is just a hoity-toity word for “urethane resin mixed with rock dust.” This, sadly, is a more expensive medium than injection molding, as is normally used on car toys & replicas of this size. And thus the going price is $540. Ouch.