The unique Estes Firing Line Ready To Fly Vampire injection-moulded, pre-assembled, and pre-decorated plastic model rocket, in design and looks a distant cousin of Estes' Astron Goblin model rocket.
The sublime look of the Vampire made it one of our favourite model rockets during the 1970s, in spite of the fact that we never actually managed to obtain one in Switzerland. It had first been featured on pages 4 and 8/9 of the 1973 Estes catalogue, but we became aware of it through a photo in the model rocketry chapter of Guy R. Williams' book The World Of Model Aircraft as well as by means of the first Estes catalogue we ever saw, the 1976 edition.
The rather tiny Vampire was designed to fly on mini motors (something we considered entirely unexciting, however), and it was also available as part of a starter kit, including the realistic Firing Line launch pad. The Vampire featured attractive paper stick-on decals. These decals do not age all too well, however; they are prone to becoming brittle and unglued, as was the case with the collector's example shown in the top photo, taken in Thalwil, Switzerland, in May of 1999.
I subsequently removed the damaged decals and carefully sanded the entire rocket, before converting it to fly with low-power 18 mm motors and restoring it to a semi-original look (bottom image, taken in Zurich, Switzerland, in June 2016).
