Brief:
When one of my rocketry buddies decided to hold a building session, I was scrambling to decide what to work on. I decided to use a 50% off Michael's coupon to grab an Estes SS1 kit for bashing. I turned it into a retro-styled spaceship with more conventional fins and wing-tip pods. I also converted it for 24mm motors.

Modifications:
The two major mods are the conversion to 24mm and the replacement of the stock wing with fins/pods. The SS1 comes with a plastic tail cone. One of the first steps on the stock kit is to cut the end of this off, leaving the scale engine bell. I wasn't sure how much of the stock bell would remain after I added the larger motor tube, so I left this on. That was a good call since there isn't much of the bell section left after it was modified. I started by cutting the tail cone at its thinnest part and then expanding each piece until the motor tube fit. When I was done, I left the back most part of the tail cone, which is a ~1/8” tubular section. This can be better understood my looking at the photos.

I expanded the provided centering "rings" and mounted the motor mount pretty much as in the stock kit.

I came upon a set of unused Fat Boy fins in my junk box and decided these would work just fine. I slotted the tail cone in between the centering rings and modified the through-the-wall tabs on the fins pretty much by trial and error. The positions were such that there are two side "wings" and a "stabilizer fin". Since the tail cone is not ovate, these sit at different heights.

Construction:
Parts list:

• One Estes SS1 (the original, smaller version)
• Fin set from an Estes Fat Boy kit
• 24mm motor tube
• Kevlar® twine
• Three and a half plastic Christmas ornaments
• Lead shot
• 3/16” launch lug

Flight:
I flew the 'Sqrt(-1)' on a D12-5 at MDRA's Red Glare IV. It flew great and the delay appeared right. Prep consisted of packing dog barf in the tail cone and clipping on a 12" nylon chute. The motor was friction fit.

Summary:
The SS1 provided the basis of a nice retro-styled spaceship. It flies so much better than the stock kit, for fairly obvious reasons (hint: it's basically a 3FNC rocket). Yeah, the some of the big dawgs of MDRA liked it...but thought it need to be upscaled.