oh wow . that's realy cool. scratch build?

Very much so. Check out my previous posts on the beast.

oh cool it's a garage kit. it's looking great.

Huh? No, its a scratch build. Frame is soldered brass and most of the details are my own resin casts of scratch built patterns.

oh x3 man i feel dumb. it's looking great!

Cool! Seems the vectoring engines are a little lacking in design stability. Being proficient is physics, they would most likely jam up or break off completely, which ever comes first. X)

Then again... it still looks cool!!! XD

Actually, looking it over, I now realized your scale.

On this note the vectoring engines will most very likely break off. If they were to be hinged strong enough, they would be far too slow, vector speed, even for a landing craft this size. XD

Talk to von Braun and friends for the design. This was suppose to be serious rocket science in 1952.

Yes, true. I am in no way saying that he is wrong. I'm just pointing something out that I happened to notice.

Taking into account the weight and sheer size of the thing, a heck of a lot of force would be needed, especially w/ older engines. The hinges, being that three engines are vectorally synced, could very well be either too slow or too weak. Of course if this craft was much smaller and unmanned, to say transport resources cheaply and effectively, the weight problem would be eradicated by far.

Truth be told, it is a pretty resourceful design, just, questionable with large craft. X)

Dunno. Operating in lunar gravity, they don't need to be all that strong. I'll trust von Braun's work, I think.

Lunar Gravity Itself no but look at the round pod at the top and tr and find the door. This is an extremely big landing craft surprisingly. I'm not saying he was wrong, but even on the moon that thing'd weigh a god damn ton! With the force the Vector engines would need to put even a dent in any preexisting trajectory during landing the hinges may very well take on a little too much pressure. 8)

Seriously? You are going to second guess a design done by real life rocket engineers based on a iffy model built 60-odd years afterwords? And without any clue as to weights or materials or motor performance?

For a sense of proportion, that framework and swivel hardware is absolutely massive compared with a Saturn V's main engine thrust structure. The motors are likely somewhere in the range of 100ton each, and the range of motion isn't likely to be much more than 5 to 15 degrees and only intend to impart pitch/roll/yaw while the main engine cluster is running. Nothing overwhelming in any of that.

Cool, you have your Plastruct strip styrene that same way as me. Fairly easy to search through in a cup or round container.

A few days ago I actually wrote an article about spaceship shapes -- what to expect and why? I was based on an old letter that I kept, and when I came across it the other day I decided it was time to revise and expand it. Now I wonder if one reason the time seemed right was because I'd seen the photos of your Willy Ley-style moonship in progress?

It's looking great.

I remember reading about this spaceship in a hardcover book some years ago. Mission profile called for an engineer to go outside and manually release any empty propellant tanks.

Looks like one of those fancy condiment stations. :)

isx that a little door, below the top sphere? and nautical guard rails? Holy cheese, how tall is that thing?

About 150 ft. The idea was that it was going to be a mission of weeks, at least, with a crew of some numbers.

build it in orbit, and depend on the 1/6th gravity to keep it from being too heavy to land. let alone leave? still it looks impressive. nicely done,

The unit would actually have shed the outer large tanks after trans-lunar insertion, so would not be quite as ponderous. It wasn't until Apollo did they got the idea of a separate lander, however. In retrospect the separate lander made more sense, separate descent/assent units even more, but was a long time coming. The old concept beast did have the advantage of being a serious long-term exploration, with a large team and weeks, at least, on the moon. I'd WAG that a moon base would have been a prompt follow-up or even using elements of the cargo version for first steps.

As this approaches completion, it's showing really museum-quality work.

I thought this was legit going to be launched to the moon.

It was to be built in low Earth orbit and then on to the moon. Realistically, it was more a thought experiment than serious proposal. Not so much a technical non-starter but one of crazy-expensive.

No interconnecting 'tunnels' between the modules? Or are there crawl spaces through the frame members?

Nice job, wish I could model my 'Folly', but the scale would be impossible ...

The top center is the only living module, the rest are fuel tanks.

ah, the 'inspection holes' made me think the others were living space ...

The circular things are thermal regulators, some kind of radiators (?). The other tanks ought to have some variation of them too.