1/48 KH-12 Reconnaissance Satellite

[jparenti]

I'd always wanted to do one of these, despite the dearth of information available. I figured I'd get as close as I possibly could, and relied on drawings by Charles Vick at Advanced Keyhole / IMPROVED CRYSTAL / "KH-12" and a model hanging in the George Bush (Sr.) Presidential Library museum.





Close enough for me.
The KH-12 satellite may not even be known as such -- the CIA stopped referring to them with the Keyhole designation after the earlier models became fairly well-known by their numerical designations in the Keyhole series. I've seen this one referred to as KH-12, Improved Crystal, Advanced Crystal, and on and on. This is just an interpretation based on conjecture and scant info, namely the model in the Bush museum and the publicly available fact that the satellite was shipped in a container that looked like the one used to ship Hubble.
I've done the model in 1/48, to match Ton's Hubble and because my normal scale of 1/24 would simply be too big to build and offer complications (sizing single parts onto multiple pages and so on).





The bus section is different in apparent size than the museum artifact. I used Vick's drawings to size the bus, which included measurements, and estimated the barrel based on the launch vehicle's shroud envelope. Skin is covered in gold foil carefully harvested from Rollo candy packages.



Mirror goes here in the next version. I glued the barrel shut before I put it in, forgetting that it couldn't go through the forward aperture.



Yes, I put the blasted end piece of the bus in upside down. Ah, well -- it's not a mistake, I'm just prototyping. Also, need the RCS units (indicated with blank triangles/squares), the navigation unit cones (indicated by blank ovals), and the cone-shaped antennas. Still trying to figure out how to do the complex curve needed for the nav unit apertures. They need to be slanted cones, and I can never get those right unless I simply trim them to size from a normal cylinder.
The real thing:





I went with the body-mounted solar arrays for now. I may change it later, although I kind of like it.



Photo window with louvers:





And compared to my 1/48 Hubble (aged badly, I shall admit, and missing a solar array that was suffering from gravitational warping).
It's a start, and very simple, but it at least resembles the model in the museum, which is encouraging so far.

[Retired_for_now]

A very interesting subject ...

Nicely done.

Yogi