Ye Olde Rocket Forum - View Single Post - What colors/scheme were the real Arcons?

Quote:

Originally Posted by foamy

Thanks blackshire, an intense search of "Peter Alway" turned up the first paint scheme (the one in the photos above) that I've seen. Looks to be black and bare metal with those two white side pods, whatever they may be. This is about what I'm looking at:

Composited from a scale drawing, the above photo and a very, very small preview image from P.A.'s supplement.

If memory serves, the white pods were antennas.

Quote:

Originally Posted by foamy

I think I'll reserve the Arca's "corporate scheme" for some time down the road—should I ever build one. The Arcon scheme is uninspired, but it looks fairly industrial.

On a side note: I find it curious that a sounding rocket as small, unsuccessful and as little used as the Arcon, should live on, almost continuously, as a model rocket. Very odd.

I think the Arcon is a perennial scale model rocket for three reasons:

[1] The world's second model rocket kit was a scale Arcon kit produced in the late 1950s by MMI (Model Missiles, Inc.), after their Aerobee-Hi kit was released. MMI's Arcon kit did not come with the finless booster. In the early 1960s, Centuri produced a larger Arcon kit (also lacking the booster) and a two-stage "semi-scale" variant of their Arcon kit called the Arcon-Hi (which never existed as a full-scale vehicle) that had large fins on its booster (Semroc offers "Retro-Repro" reproductions of both Centuri kits).

[2] Like the IQSY Tomahawk (which is also a common scale model rocket despite the fact that only four rounds of the full-scale rocket are known to have been flown), the Arcon was a vehicle for which scale data was readily available.

[3] The Arcon was a simple vehicle, which makes it a good beginner's scale project and makes for a high-performance model. (I do not look down on "simple scalers" such as the Arcon, as I like "boring" 3FNC/4FNC model rockets because simplicity is beautiful, and because they *look* like rockets.)