Background: The Standard Missile Saga

At one point in his career, Brad worked for Honeywell's Military Avionics Division, a unit that supplies inertial components to a variety of high-tech Defense systems. So when he started building high-power rockets, he had a keen interest in building airworthy scale replicas of these systems. One of these systems is the U.S. Navy's Standard Missile.

Brad's first Standard Missile was the 1/5 scale RIM-67a plan pack from The Launch Pad. A nice kit, but under-powered with 3 D12 black powder motors in the booster. After a single, lackluster flight this design was upgraded to mid-power, and both Brad and Mark built identical models that flew at the October 2000 G. Harry Stine Memorial Launch in Phoenix, AZ. Rick, a little slower on the uptake, still has his Standard Missile on the drawing board in October 2001.

Who knows when it really started, but sometime after that launch one of the brothers quipped that it would be cool to do a group project Standard Missile, either 1/3 or 2/5 scale. So the brainstorming began on Frankenstein's monster, not realizing that it would someday turn and attack the town. The creature was fully unleashed when Brad did a photo mockup of a 1/3 scale SM2 and emailed to his brothers across the country. There was no stopping us after that point.

Standard Missile Design

There is a lot of data available on the Standard Missile, including actual Navy blueprints with full scale dimensions (sustainer only) found at http://www.yellowjacketsystems.com/jimball/scale-data/scale.htm .

We settled into a 2/5 scale design after studying available components and realizing that the LOC-Precision 5.38" nose cone (with some modification) was roughly the right length and ogive. So the outside diameter of the sustainer became 5.54", which is 41% of the actual 13.5" diameter. Armed with a set of calipers we fastidiously measured dimensions of the missile from various photographs. Based on our estimates, the outside diameter of the booster needed to be (roughly) 7 1/2" - the QuikTube from Home Depot (8" nominal) has an outside diameter of 7 5/8" and seemed to be a logical and inexpensive choice. It was decided the entire airframe and fins should be fiberglass reinforced.

As most other designs, the upscale SM2 was modeled in RockSim 5.0. Click here for the final simulation. Shown is a 3D rendering from RockSim.