04-30-2019, 01:31 PM
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Master Modeler
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Posts: 6,507
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by tbzep
Over 100 posts for a plastic rocket. That's amazing considering all the bashing that's been done in the past about heavy plastic rockets. 
On a similar note, the 3D printed parts are becoming fashionable after years of complaints of heavy plastic parts.
Times have changed.
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Willy Ley's statement about an atomic-powered Moonship in his and Chesley Bonestell's--he provided the wonderful paintings in it--1949 book, "The Conquest of Space" (see: http://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-sear...thor/ley-willy/ ) is now apparently the accepted paradigm in model rocketry (at least where scale models are concerned). Not knowing how small a sufficiently powerful atomic rocket engine might be made, Ley wrote that the smallest practical engine for a Moonship might be "a compact seven-ton unit," but he added that the size and weight of a spaceship is no problem as long as you have sufficient power to move it (as the non-atomic-powered Saturn V would amply demonstrate less than twenty years later!). |