Yogi's builds - to boldy glue, where ...

[luke strawwalker]

Originally Posted by Paper Kosmonaut

Great job you did there, Yogi. A nice couple of cheese plates full of rockets. That little school bus you hid away in the picture there is a very good thing indeed to show the children the size of all those candles. And I appreciate what you do for educating kids. That's a wonderful thing you do. (I also made a small model of a local bus type to accompany my rocket garden to get a better grasp of their size)

As for a suggestion for the planets, since you never will be able to get it all right in distance and size, I'd put them together on a display base, on different heights, each on their own stick. It makes a nice display that way. As a guideline, you could place an image of the solar system's elements with their relative distance and their sizes on the base.
Are those ball shapes hard to make? Never tried them myself.

If yall have ever been (or ever get to go) to Space Center Houston, the visitor center of the Johnson Space Center near Houston, TX, they have a scale solar system display outside... it's based around about a foot diameter "sun" on the end of the sidewalk at the end of the parking lot sidewalk in front of the entrance... You start off at the sun, and walking up the sidewalk you go about 10-15 feet to Mercury, where there is a signboard telling you about the planet, and inset in a piece of glass, a mote-size representation of the actual scale of the planet to the sun. Continuing up the sidewalk another 20 feet or so, there's a signboard for Venus, with a small representation of the planet in glass, about the size of a fat period on the end of this sentence. Continuing on, you come to Earth, similarly signed with a glass with a representation of Earth in it, roughly the diameter of a pencil lead, with a "moon" about the size of a sewing needle diameter a couple inches away (in scale distance). Walking on about another 50 feet or so, you come to Mars, with a representation of the planet in glass, about the diameter of a slim mechanical pencil lead... Then it's about another 20-30 yards to Jupiter, which is a sphere in the glass about as big around as your thumb, circled by the four primary moons at scale distances, a little smaller than the period at the end of the sentence. Continuing onward, across the entrance plaza to the visitor center, is a signboard for Saturn, with the ringed planet embedded in glass, about the diameter of your pinky finger, surrounded by rings maybe an inch or two across... with the principle moon, including Titan, orbiting at scale distances... At this point your maybe 100 yards from the "sun", and the LONG walk starts... about 100 yards on you come to the sign for Uranus, with it's gaggle of tiny mote moons... Uranus is, at this scale, about the size of a pencil eraser. Another 200 yards on you come to Neptune, with it's main moons Triton and Nereid, in scale, with Neptune about the size of a pencil eraser. If you walk about another 200 yards, which puts you ALL the way down the sidewalk on the entry road wrapping around the parking lot, down a probably 50-75 yard sidewalk out into the adjoining field across from the parking lot, you come to the signage for Pluto... which is again, mote sized, with Charon it's primary moon. You're now well over a quarter mile from the entrance to the visitor center, and further still from the "sun" where you started... BTW, lightspeed at this scale is about as fast as the typical ant crawls...

Later! OL JR

[Retired_for_now]

Entirely correct, JR. But, tough to set up in the classroom. Had a local teacher do a "full size" ISS layout on the football field a few years ago - not something they can do regularly.
The original thought when I did the first of these a few years ago was to include a similar table - but based on a roughly 3.5" Earth model (can scale the inner planets that way). The Sun would be a 30' sphere about 3000 ft away; the Moon out 8' away from the Earth. Jupiter makes a 30" sphere over 3 miles from the Sun/center, etc. on out. Problem was just how useful it would be in the classroom (have the kids run all over town ...?).
My thought here was to have the inner planets sized correctly to each other; separate outer planets sized relative to Jupiter with a little blue bead for Earth on the outer planet display to make a transition. The relative orbital distances for the outer planets would show all the inner worlds clustered/overlapping on top of the Sun/center with the outer planet orbits spaced widely.
P-K's suggestions is looking like the most practical solution right now.
Yogi

[luke strawwalker]

Originally Posted by Retired_for_now

Entirely correct, JR. But, tough to set up in the classroom. Had a local teacher do a "full size" ISS layout on the football field a few years ago - not something they can do regularly.
The original thought when I did the first of these a few years ago was to include a similar table - but based on a roughly 3.5" Earth model (can scale the inner planets that way). The Sun would be a 30' sphere about 3000 ft away; the Moon out 8' away from the Earth. Jupiter makes a 30" sphere over 3 miles from the Sun/center, etc. on out. Problem was just how useful it would be in the classroom (have the kids run all over town ...?).
My thought here was to have the inner planets sized correctly to each other; separate outer planets sized relative to Jupiter with a little blue bead for Earth on the outer planet display to make a transition. The relative orbital distances for the outer planets would show all the inner worlds clustered/overlapping on top of the Sun/center with the outer planet orbits spaced widely.
P-K's suggestions is looking like the most practical solution right now.
Yogi

Oh, I agree... I was just throwing that out there as an FYI... I did the calculations one time when I was in high school for a scale model of the solar system based on a standard 12 inch Earth globe (found in any school library). Turns out Pluto is nearly 90 miles away (nearly the distance between our farms here at Needville and Shiner, TX). The sun is the size of a ten story building... and the nearest star would be somewhere on the actual planet Mars 36 million miles away... (as best I can recall)

I used to goof with scaling stuff back then... came up with a way to measure the dimensions of rockets from photographs-- ideally the larger the photograph and the more "straight on" the picture was taken to minimize perspective effects, the better-- so long as I had ONE dimension, I could calculate the others to a varying degree of certainty... (sorta like running my own mini- NPIC... course in the late 80's, there was no internet to get the data from-- bout wore out the Bill Gunston books in the library measuring stuff to build model rockets). I once built a flying SS-17 (as it was then shown in the magazines and books, which turned out to be wrong) and a model Minuteman III... around 1/135 scale for one and about 1/145 scale for the other, IIRC... (been 25 years ago). Even dug a silo to launch the SS-17 in the back yard with a post hole digger and put a paver stone over it for a "silo door"... LOL Worked pretty well actually... At any rate, I got the performance figures and throw weights from one of Bill Gunston's books (Rockets and Missiles of WWIII IIRC) and "scaled" the performance of my models, to the real thing... turns out my Minuteman III model, if it performed like the real thing, would have flown about 180 miles from here (from Needville to about New Braufels, Texas, just this side of San Antonio) and detonated with a force equal to a little less than the Hiroshima bomb. My SS-17 should have flown to basically just the other side of San Antonio and detonated there with the force just a bit more than the Nagasaki bomb...

Of course Estes propelled model rockets don't perform anything close to "scale"... LOL Hard to imagine getting that much explosive power in something the size of those little incense spikes either (which were about scale size of actual ICBM RV's...)

Later! OL JR

[TheHeebrewHammer]

Hey Yogi,
Changing topic just slightly.... Have you built a paper model of Orbital Science Corp.'s Antares rocket?
On Monday there is a supposed to be a 29 second hot fire of its engines for the first time this coming Monday on Wallops Island, VA.
More here.


Antares
Pics:

[Retired_for_now]

Antares should be available at ECardemodels. There's also a simpler one at Lower Hudson Valley (jleslie48.com) in the earlier Taurus II livery.
Yogi

BTW - the belated creation mentioned earlier (Holmdel radio telescope) is posted in the architecture downloads. After all, it does keep the rain off your head if you're in the instrument shack ...

[Retired_for_now]

So, spending time watching Leonard Susskind's series from Stanford (long time past college physics for me), planning the next teacher workshop, and building give-aways for same.

Got to thinking about how to better tell a story with the displays. Not necessarily a realistic scene/diorama - but ya'll are a great source of inspiration. So here's our current lineup of spacecraft that are outbound:



It ain't P-K but it might work ...

Yogi

added: 1:48 scale all; the Pioneer 10/11 is Ton's, the Voyager 1/2 mine (our download section), the New Horizon's is an enlargement of my Atlas V payload version (should be at ECardModels, but Vaugh Hoxie's version is a bit nicer - just uses more paper)

[Paper Kosmonaut]

Nice clean build and also very funny. I'd like having one of those school bus rocket engines on my Volvo 240 one day. After I saw one of your earlier comparison bus displays, I wanted something similar on my shelves, too. I found a Dutch site which hosts simple but nice models of the types of buses they had around here in my region up til 15 years ago. I made two of them (a yellow and a red one) to let other people get that sense of scale with something familiar.

[legion]

PK, you mean those ZWN Den Oudsten ones with the red seats? Those were the only busses I could sit in comfortably...

[Paper Kosmonaut]

Over here in Grunn the GADO worked the region with these yellow ones, Chassis by Leyland, coachwork by Den OUdsten. There were several different types but this one was most common in my youth:


and if I recall correctly, they indeed had red imitation leather upholstery.
In Grunn city there were those dark red buses with a different but also red interior, chassis made by DAF and Hainje made the coachwork.



I still think those buses had some character. I don't really like the modern ones. I'm getting old. Or nostalgic.
Okay, enough about earth rolling equipment. Let's go back to the space thingies!

[sparky00]

Yogi,
I've just received my first request to build some paper models for classroom use- Apollo CSM and LM. From your postings, I know that you do many builds for educators and have a question. Given that second-grade classroom is one of the harshest environments this side of space or the deep ocean, and that one drop of water can do significant damage to graphics, do you spray or seal the outside of your models in any way? If so, what do you use? I've been thinking about spraying them with Rustoleum crystal clear. I've used this on stomp rockets before with good results.
Thanks, erik