SWORD BOOSTER ROCKET SCALE

The question of a common scale for SWORD vehicles has had me thinking recently and the last post about the spaceship that sits on the end of Booster Rockets brought to mind the original design for a Nuclear powered vehicle to visit Mars.

The Lockheed Martin idea for a Booster Rocket with detachable fuel tanks was topped by a two man lander. Given that an additional two crew members may have stayed on board the main ship, a four man crew might seem reasonable. Looking at the Valigursky artwork for the ship, the shuttle does not appear to be much larger and this design seems to have been carried over to the SWORD ship. The Spacex version of the Booster Rocket has opted for a more visible cockpit on the front of the red shuttle, which might suggest a crew of two to four once more.

Given that the Nuclear Ferry concept by LTV was designed to carry 28 passengers and the SWORD toy clearly carries 10 astronauts, its possible to say the booster rocket is on a slighly smaller scale than the Nuclear Ferry and therefore the full sized vehicle would be slightly larger. The Solo strip seems to have little reference of scale between the vehicles and draws the ships to suit the requirements of the story rather than relative to the toys themselves.