After a tremendously long hiatus, I finished production and released my latest micro-rocket kit: The R10 MX Solar Warrior.

R10 Solar Warrior

This is a 38% downscale of an Estes kit from the early to mid ’90s that I loved the look of but never actually owned.

R10 kit contents.

A considerable part of the delay was simply settling on a paint scheme I really liked. Eventually it hit me that it should be a tribute to Ukraine and my Ukrainian friends & colleagues. There’s some literary connection there in that Ukraine is the world’s largest exporter of sunflowers and sunflower products. From there it took a while for inspiration to hit and the scheme you see here to develop. As a bonus, the R10 works well visually with the American-themed R5 MX Hawkeye.

BFFs Solar Warrior and Hawkeye.

Given the tiny size, the only realistic way to enable most people to replicate that fin pattern was to do a print sticker. That’s as opposed to a spray mask or layers of vinyl. That in turn meant though that I had to either significantly increase the precision of my kiss cutting or have people do so themselves. The latter would be reasonable for these shapes, sizes, and quantities, but I went for the first one. That in turn introduced more delay and demotivation as I had to swap out cutting equipment, develop new templates, establish new parameters, and so on toward overhauling the workflow. The end result was worth it though.

The original prototype from early 2022.