Brief:
Inspired by Star Trek, this futuristic spaceship design will draw a crowd at the pad and flies surprisingly well. At $60, it's a bit on the pricey side, but it is made with quality components and design and is challenging and enjoyable to build.

Construction:
I ordered my kit via the Sirius Rocketry website with their flagship Saturn V kit. There was a delay of a couple days mainly due to the complexity of packing up the Saturn kit, but within a week I had the Atlantis piled deep within my ever-growing build queue. After allowing it to properly age for a month or so, I pulled it to the front of the line and cracked into it.

The parts list is fairly extensive, so the following is a somewhat abbreviated version:

• Balsa nose cone and metal screw eye
• BT-55 tube
• 10" BT-50 motor tube and D-size metal hook
• (4) BT-5 pod reinforcement tubes
• Assorted wood dowels for trim
• Vacu-formed side pod halves and cockpit top
• 1/8" laser-cut plywood fin and top deck stock
• 24" mylar chute kit
• 3/16" launch lugs
• 4 waterslide decal sheets

My kit was short the chute, which was quickly replaced when I pointed it out. The tubes were among the best I've ever worked with, which took a lot of the work out of finishing. The quality of the vacu-forms was very good though the edge lines of the pod halves were not very clearly pronounced, leading to a somewhat sloppy fit and potentially hefty rework for the sake of appearance.

This is labeled as a skill level 4 kit and I would agree with that assessment. Working with the vacu-forms is probably the most challenging aspect to it, and the unusual design and assortment of trim details adds to the overall complexity factor as well. Excluding some special circumstance rework (more on that later), I invested about 30 hours into this and came out of it with a pretty resectable finish. On the low end, it can probably be built in about 12-16 hours without worrying about the cosmetics, which would be a real crime on a kit of this calliber.

While most instructions say "read the whole thing first" yet are still ignored, a thorough reading is a definite must for this kit. It really helps you get a sense of how things go together and helps avoid some basic mistakes along the way. I still have the weird feeling that the thing is upside down, but that's just the way it is and I'd inevitably have wound up getting top and bottom confused without having the end product in mind as I went.

The instructions were well written and the illustrations were fairly helpful although oddly placed. In a couple of instances, I found myself reading something on one page and having to refer to an illustration on a different (usually previous) page. On the plus side, there were also plenty of helpful tips on construction and finishing techniques right down to specific brands and colors for paint and clear coat.

Motor mount assembly is routine: slot the tube for the D-hook and slide on 3 centering rings. One of the rings needs to be notched for slipping the hook out of the way. Give yourself plenty of room on that slot. The assembly is finished up with the attachment of a Kevlar® shock cord anchor, which runs most of the way up the tube before switching over to elastic. A very nice and durable approach that is unlikely to cause the zippers that I've run into with designs that take the Kevlar® all the way out the body tube. The finished assembly then goes into the single piece body tube, another nice touch that probably makes this a pain to ship.

Marking the tube is accomplished using a wraparound guide. In addition to the basic lines, there are areas in the tube that need to be cut out for through the wall fins.

The "belly fin" is actually an assembly of a center piece, two side pieces, and an antenna dowel sandwiched in between. An oval-shaped "antenna dish" completes the assembly. This assembly becomes the first of the 3 primary fins.

The two side fins are mounted through the wall. The gap between the BT-55 and the BT-50 motor tube is small, so the tab is fairly short. There are a pair of "side decks" that are trim fins, tucked in above the side pod fins. A pair of dowels lining the underside finish the lower trim, and a funky-shaped top "deck" with a vacu-form bridge completes the top trim. The end result leaves lots of little nooks and crannies which are a challenge to paint.

The pod assembly was the most challenging aspect of the kit. You start by bonding together two BT-5s which are slightly different lengths for a tapered end effect. These serve as reinforcments to the vacu-formed pod halves on the inside. The halves are cut from the vacu-forms, and even under bright light I had trouble determining where the ends were. I went conservative (thick), and wound up with a lot of sanding to trim them fairly flush. After the sanding, I fit them over the tubes and found a couple of spots where there were slight gaps. Anticipating this, the kit includes styrene stock for cutting patch strips. You then have the option of leaving the strips as is for an accent stripe, or sanding them flush for a smooth look. I went for the smooth look and even after 3 nights of tinkering/sanding/filling, still wasn't quite satisfied with the look and moved on despite a few small gaps and seam lines showing.

Once the pods are assembled, you cut slots through the BT-5 and inner pod half for through the wall mounting to the side fins. These were a real pain to tack in place and keep aligned but worth the wait. I made the mistake of using yellow glue and would recommend medium CA for this instead, which will speed up the bonding. Finally, each pod gets a small trim fin mounted to the bottom surface.

Attaching the nose cone and chute completes the assembly.

Finishing:
With such light tube spirals, I didn't bother with anything other than a light coat of Plasti-Cote primer, which was actually applied and sanded down before starting construction. I also didn't seal the plywood although I did give it a good sanding with 220 then 400 grit paper.

For paint, I went with very light coats being paranoid about runs and overspray around all the crevices. I wound up using 4 very thin coats of primer, two gray followed by two white along with sanding and touching up a bit between coats.

The recommended color scheme for this is a light gray (True-Value Easy Color "Silver Fog"). I'm really anal retentive and trekked 30 minutes across town, passing at least 10 other hardware stores and/or big box stores along the way to our city's only True Value store. Naturally, they don't carry "Silver Fog" but did carry a darker "Pewter Gray", which I went with. Overall, it was a bit darker than I'd have liked and it would have been better with a light gray or even white.

The pods get hand-painted interior trim in navy blue and a small area painted copper. The antenna and radar dish also get a copper touch ups.

Finally, you get to the real cost driver for the kit: the decals. There are 4 sheets of waterslides. In anticipation of more work than I can typically stuff into a weeknight after work/dinner/life and before bed, I approached this in batch mode, cutting everything one night, followed by a night of application, and a planned third night of micro-sol to seal them in. Night one was no problem, just lots of cutting. Night two started well, the first sheet of decals was among the best I've ever worked with, absolutely clear, tough enough to avoid stretching when sliding off the paper, and easy to smooth out for a wrinkle-free finish. Moving on to sheet #2 though, I ran into problems--the decals were opaque, didn't stick as well, and when I rubbed them smooth the ink started to rub off. I contemplated whether or not it was worth buying a replacement sheet while moving on to sheets #3 and #4 and found they were just as bad. In fact, the decals from sheet #2 even started peeling off and curling. Horrible decals, absolutely ruining what had up till now been a very enjoyable project.

I emailed Dave, who was that very night experiencing the same problem with a kit he was prototyping. To make a long story less long (too late for short), he had drop shipped a batch of decal paper to his printer and no one in the chain caught that the paper supplier had switched from a thick/obvious tissue liner to a thin/hardly noticeable liner and the liner was not removed. My decals were printed on tissue. It took us about 3 days to sort out the scope and cause of the problem. Within a week replacement decals were in my mailbox. The replacements were perfect. Fortunately, the bad decals were such trash that it only took a few minutes to flake them off.

While the decal experience indicates a hit to the quality score (although not the fault of Sirius), I can tell you that I was very impressed with Dave's efforts to make everything right. The replacement decal fiasco probably wiped out any hope of profit on the kit (as many kits were certainly affected), but he won me over as a repeat customer.

The new and improved decals are protected by 5 very thin/light applications of Krylon clear coat. I've had very mixed results with this and confirmed with Dave before trying it that he actually applied this stuff. I'll say there were no compatability problems. The clear coats maintains a nice glossy finish.

Construction Rating: 4 out of 5

Flight:
The recommended motor is a D12-5, but for first flight Sirius suggests a D12-3. This is probably in case you come in above the 9.0 ounce target weight (as mine weighed in at 9.5 ounces), and an overly long delay could deploy too far past apogee. (photo courtesy of Scott McNeely)

With the big fin area and weight of the rocket, I was expecting a slow flight. It surprised me by shooting up fairly quickly although it weathercocked a good bit into the 5mph winds. Deployment was definitely early and the -5 delay would have been a better fit. I'm not too good at estimating low altitudes, but I would put this in the 350-300 foot range.

Recovery:
The chute is made by Rockethead Rockets and is very good quality for a mylar chute. In this price range though, I would have expected a lightweight nylon chute. The chute held up fine to the early deployment and the rocket descended at a reasonable rate, landing at the edge of our short grass portion of the field. Based on its landing angle, I would be worried about damage in the future though. It came down first hitting a side pod, which is fairly rugged, then kicked right over on the 1/8" dowel antenna, which sticks out a couple of inches at the bottom of the belly fin. I'm going to kick around a couple of ideas but will try to come up with a yoke recovery harness for flight that will keep it off the antenna.

Overall though, it suffered no damage other than a little powder streak, which I'm going to buff out before flying again and will protect it with a coat of wax as well.

Flight Rating: 4 out of 5

Summary:
I was very impressed with this kit. Not so proud of it that I'll never fly it again but proud enough not to want to overdo it and risk damaging it. It's definitely a craftsmanship kit and its highly unusual design draws a lot of looks at the pad.

PROs: Exceptional quality of components, great design, outstanding customer service, and replacement decals were superb. I especially like the fact that it can fly on relatively affordable D12 motors rather than having to spring for $8-12 per flight for composites.

CONs: High price, poor decals slipped through the system, vacu-forms were great quality but lacked sharp edge lines.

If you can afford it, get one while you can. It's a fairly limited run kit and waiting for another run of kits could take a while.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5