Given my normal preference for blowing my model rockets up and not having them come home with me after a launch session, I was surprisingly bummed to have lost my most stalwart, dependable rocket last weekend. I would have been fine if it would have ended up flying off course and disintigrating in a mass of fiery cardboard and balsa wood, but it seemed such an ignominous, wimpy end for it to wind up on top of a tree. I’ve walked over there several times to see if wind has shaken it free, but its parachute and recovery shock cord are wrapped around boughs, and it’s not going anywhere for the foreseeable future. This weekend’s rains have no doubt gotten into the body tube, so even if it did come down, odds are it wouldn’t be usable or even displayable again.

Since it was such a crummy weekend, I decided to take a bunch of scraps and hulks and spare parts and whip up a new fleet of rockets, which you can see in the photo at right. The ones on the left and right will use the more powerful D engines, while the one in the middle is built for the standard B and C engines. The one on the right is probably the heaviest one I’ve built to launch, a chunky collection of five body tubes and thick fins. The one on the left is the opposite, a very light, very frail bird with tiny delicate fins that will either ride the big engine incredibly high and straight, or will be completely unstable due to the small margins of error in control with such limited control surfaces. These two rockets scream “launch pad disaster” to me, which makes me happy, because that’s more entertaining than “got stuck in a tree disaster.”

I only had one can of spray paint when it came time to give the fleet its new livery. Can you guess what color it was?