X-20 Dyna Soar & Transtage 1/48 (1)

A legendary spaceplane. Never flown, never realised. In the late 1950s, when the X-15 made its first powered flights, the U.S. Ministry of Defense already dreamt about spying on the Russians from outer space. And what would be a nicer idea than a reusable space plane? Long story short, Boeing was chosen to create the little manned space plane called the X-20 Dyna Soar (dynamic soaring). But after creating a full scale mockup, selecting six Air Force pilots to become astronauts for the plane and lots of training equipment and space suit designs, senator MacNamara cancelled the project.  Reason: spysats had become very efficient and cheap(ish) and otherwise Gemini spacecraft could do the job equally well. No need for a space plane. Bye bye Dyna Soar.

Dyna Soar mock up with two suited men, presumably Boeing officials.
Photo: Wikimedia commons

But look at it. Just. Look. At. It. Isn't is beautiful? Paper model designer Mark Cable designed a beautiful 1/48th scale model with the so-called Transtage, a kind of kick-booster stage of the large Titan rocket family. A weird-looking contraption with protruding tanks having pointy ends, rocket engine bells on a trapezium tube construction and checkers on the sides. Hypergolically fueled, it had a simple and reliable propulsion method. No need for elaborate turbo pumps, the rocket was just pressure-fed and the fuel ignited when mixed.

Dyna Soar and its transtage in orbit. The forward facing windows were covered with a protective shield that would
be jettisoned after re-entry. The X-20 would land on a dry Californian lakebed using metal skids.
Image: Buran.ru

This is how the X-20 might have looked when arriving in orbit.
And that is how I am going to build it. Here's an initial photo, after the jump you can see the rest of the first session of building the Dyna Soar.

The print was made on 180 gram matte photo paper. I has nice crisp detail and looks good.
I just follow the instructions on this one but I already started to go my own way after a first mishap. Haha!

Now here I go.

Well enough apparently is never well enough for me. So the printed windows were cut out and ditched  and replaced for some little bits of LEE gel filters for theatrical lighting (079 Just Blue). They stick reasonably well with PVA, so no misting up.

What I did was messing up, because I wasn't happy with how the fuselage went together when I had do close it up. I smudged it and there were seams I found too large. So I started again. Then I didn't like the print quality. (the paper has a front and back side but they are hard to discern. So one more time, then. Allright. I obviously followed the same steps. Cut-out windows and all.

Now I deviated from the instructions and FIRST glued the back of the fuselage on before I closed up the whole fuselage. Due to a little mistake, I also replaced the hatch on top of the cockpit with that of an older print. It gave the fuselage some extra detail because of the deel pines around the new hatch.
I also reinforced the flat bottom part with thick cereal box card. That meant I also had to shorten the 'skeleton' inside with a few millimeters. I had a perfect fit and it was so much sturdier. Happy with it, I continued. You can see the abandoned carcass of the old build in the background on the photos below:

I added extra side walls to make it easier to hold the space plane later on.
Otherwise the thin-ish paper would cave in too much for my liking.

Nose cone was up next. The construction is both easy and elaborate. Also becasue of the working order. I is necessary to read the steps first and then draw your own conclusions. Mark makes nice models but I like to deviate his instructions. Side walls were glued to the bottom part. on the inside were glue tabs that conected them to the 'floor' and to the side windows. The nose cone neede to be glued in stages as well: first to the sides and up agaist the windows...

... and then the underside needed to be glued together.
After that, the windows could be glued into place.

Up next was the back of the fusealge. Now I would like to have the Transtage and the Dyna Soar detachable. What else can I use but magnets? I ripped a bunch of powerful little magnets out of an old Macintosh G4 a long time ago. These will do fine. I wrapped one in passapartout-card to go on to the inside of the X-20's back part.

Completely built-in it still was powerful enough to hold the other magnet through yet another piece of thick card.

The back piece was insired by the original kit part but entirely scratch built from silver coated paper, thin metal wire and other types of paper. It eventually was carefully placed into the backside of the fuselage.

As you can see, it really is a powerful set of magnets. The visible one will go into the neck of the Transtage adapter. That is for another time. Up next will be the X-20 wings.

Until next time, stay safe and thanks for stopping by.

--PK