HST-11 Fireflash (duplicate, sorry)

[kapteenipirk]

 

HST-11 Fireflash

 

 

Info on the actual aircraft:

 

The Fireflash is basically a hyper-sonic (mach-6) atomic powered passenger aircraft, that appeared in the first episode of Thunderbirds.

 

The Fireflash is powered by 6 Atomus engines on the near tips of the elevator, witch receive power from a nuclear reactor in the back of the fuselage.

This reactor is able to operate for around 6 months, but the shielding around it has to be checked and repaired every 3-4 hours or lethal amounts of radiation will fill the cabins.

 

 

(building this in 1:1 scale would be quite project as it's apparently about 300m long)

 

 

 

Info on the KSP one:

Oh how happy i am to know that this thing lives again.

 

I was looking at reference pictures for a completely different replica project when i stumbled upon some pictures of the Fireflash from Gerry Anderson's Thuderbirds.

I hadn't seen even a single episode of it for nearly a dozen years, but i still remembered the aircraft design and knew i had seen the episode it appeared in when i was very little (5 years old or something). I watched Thunderbirds quite a bit back then and even now i can remember some things from a bunch of different episodes.

The Fireflash is honestly one of the most beautiful aircraft designs ive ever come across and i just had to make one. And after a LOT of hard work i did.

 

Happened to find a pick of the aircraft i was searching picks for. I never showed it before, so enjoy this little extra showcase.

Spoiler

It's a replica of the Russian M-4 Molot, an aircraft that was used as a heavy bomber and as a heavy lift aircraft for the Russian space-program after some few mods.

I used like 2-3 different mods to make this, it was supposed to be start of a more extensive range of modded replica crafts that would all use 2-3 mods on them, kinda like another project that fell on the floor and got vacuumed out of existence (didn't think it was worth it and kinda didn't have the motivation for it)

This little replica was something i built during the 1.3 pre-release (not sure about the version but it was a pre-release version), during that pre-release there was something weird that happened, as the aircraft just immediately exploded on the runway. I was pretty sure it shouldn't do that.

 

I wasn't even supposed to fix this as i taught it was going to be forever broken, but once i tested and noticed that the MD-11 replica (pretty similarly broken) that i made during those times, started to work, i decided to take a look at this replica as-well and see if it had started to work again, and thankfully it had. It could also be that me removing and reattaching pretty-much the entire aircraft back to the nose may have reset something that was wrong (i remember there was an issue with the Rigid attachment).

 

The Fireflash was something i wanted to build before, but was unable to do successfully, i took me 3 version(4 if we count the biz-jet sized version) to realize that maby i shouldn't be trying this anymore.

I wasn't supposed to go back and make another one, but after i found and built a paper-model of it (found from the" Papermodelers" forums), i got re-motivated and wanted to give it another go.

This time i decided not to go for as huge a replica as before. I went for a more simple round fuselage version with MK-1 passenger fuselages as the windows instead of the double decker MK-3 design or the giant super-wide design.

Spoiler

That version has got to be the heaviest aircraft ive ever made as a 2 passenger fuselage long section of the fuselage alone was 40-60 tons.

 

You can see that the wings in those versions are a lot longer and thinner than the ones in the latest version, that's because i didn't have any top-down images from witch to see that what the shape/profile of the wing actually looks like. Thankfully i had a paper-model to use this time around.

The first version i made was pretty close to the one with the wider fuselage, it got corrupted before i could test it. That's why there's no pick of it.

 

 

The paper-model i used is a pretty simple one designed by Gary Pilsford. It was a pretty lovely little build and quite short because of it's simplicity.

Spoiler

A paper model like this, and indeed any model are invaluable in replica building. Their especially good for getting the wing-shape/profile just right.

It was especially useful in this case as there are really no top-down or 3-way view or any of those kinds of picks of the actual aircraft nor any of the models people have made. Plus, it's quite hard to get it right using those kinds of picks anyway.

 

Here's some few more picks of the aircraft:

Spoiler

I wanted to give pilots a more authentic view

 

I tried to recreate parts of the Air Terrainean livery in stock as best i could without using a billion parts (like making the letters and numbers from a billion thermometers and barometers or whatever).

It was actually surprisingly hard to get the stripes on the MK-3 tanks to show up and align correctly, it was pretty much pixel perfect surgery.

From past experience, it was pretty obvious there was no way that the engine-pods would work, so i placed some engines under the wings.

Landing-gears are also placed where the under-wing engines are.

 

Technical specs:

Top speed: 160 m/s in low altitude

Stall speed: 75 m/s

Length: 61.9m

Wingspan: 31.6m

Height: 14.4m

Mass: 241 tons

Parts: 597

 

NOTE!!!

Because of the way the aircraft is designed, it's very heavy and hasn't really got big enough wings, because of this, it's impossible to reach high altitudes as the aircraft hasn't got enough lift.

 

Download link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/96m8vb3ocq6sbz2/HST 11 FireFlash.craft?dl=0

 

And there you have it, a finally successful attempt at replicating the Fireflash. I hope you enjoy it .

 

Edited April 15, 2018 by kapteenipirk
Looks like i accidentally made a duplicate post.