Normally people are impressed with aircraft going higher, faster. And that’s certainly worth getting impressed about. But prepare to be impressed with aircraft going *incredibly* slow…
Someday it will be practical to 3D print structures of incredibly lightness using carbon fiber, with structures decimeters long and hair-thin, while still rigid. With skins of graphene and “rubber bands” made out of… well, I don’t know what, imagine the wondrously impractical ghostlike aircraft that will be built. With equally advanced optics and electronics, such aircraft could have cameras and transmitters. carried aloft by high altitude balloons, they could be released at the edge of space to fly for potentially days, covering hundreds or thousands of miles, their weak signals picked up by ground or space based receivers. I don’t know if cameras and transmitters will be good enough to make them useful intelligence gathering systems, but they are very unlikely to be detected by IR or radar. With their carbon constructions and extreme surface area to volume rations, when they are done they will likely degrade away to almost nothing very quickly.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has driven home the usefulness of dropping things from quadcopters. They can carry surprising payloads a good distance and place them with some fair accuracy; in war, payloads such as grenade, mortar shells, RPG warheads are obvious and useful choices.
But then there’s this:
It’s not immediately obvious why the owner of a heating & cooling company would use a drone to drop dye packs into private and motel swimming pools. This makes the pools undesirable for swimming and costs the owners large sums to not only flush the pools but clean them. And it does not seem like his business benefits from that; if his company specialized in pool maintenance, it’d make sense. Maybe he just doesn’t like swimming pools.
The dye packs seem unlikely to be much of a health hazard… even if they are somewhat toxic, the sickly green color would dissuade people from getting in the water. But there are other things that could be easily dropped that would be much less obvious and far more dangerous. If the drone operators goal was terrorism or simple mayhem, I can think of a *lot* of things that could be dropped in a pool (or elsewhere) that would be nightmarish.
The goal of *most* crimes is not terrorism. Most criminals, I suspect, would be just as happy if their crimes went un-noticed. In those cases, drones are somewhat limited. They are useful for smuggling… crossing borders with drugs, say, or dropping drugs, phones, weapons, cash into prison yards. Most crime would seem to involve some sort of theft, and, so far, quadcopters seem of limited utility there. Given that shoplifting is not only a largely unopposed crime, in many of the worst districts it’s not even a *crime* anymore, you hardly need to make much effort to technologically innovate in the field.
Maybe there’ll be a bank robbery (or a heist movie) where the thieves get out of the bank and, instead of trying to escape with large sacks of cash, they hook them to waiting drones. The cash flies off, and now the thieves are unburdened as they attempt to make their escape.
And then there’ll be the *darker* bank heist movie: drones are used to make off with the sacks of cash. But that’s not the end: on some sort of predictable basis, subsets of that cash are released by drone over a public area. So people begin to gather in their masses to snag the bills. And then once a big enough crowd is gathered, another set of bills is dumped on them. This time, though, the bills have been soaked in smallpox or some such…
A sad percentage of my cyanotypes fail… faded, blurry or spotty. Sometimes these failure are due to bad craftsmanship; sometimes to material deficiencies, and surprisingly often, environmental factors (humidity has wreaked havoc, see the “spots”). Mostly these get simply tossed, meaning a lot of material, time and effort are wasted.
But it occurred to me that while they’d stink as proper blueprints, they might make dandy giftwrapping paper. So I’ll try that. I’m thinking of ebaying this lot of A-12 diagrams. These are all about 24X36 inches. Five sheets; if these were all successful, that’d be more than three hundred dollars worth of blueprints. Obviously not worth that, some fraction. And instead of being mailed rolled, they’ll be simply folded and sent in a padded envelope. If interested, send an email. If I get an offer that overcomes my depression at the failure these otherwise represent, that’d be great. Otherwise, ebay.
The rewards for August, 2023, have been released. They include:
Document: Report No. ZD-013, “Preliminary Detail Specification for United States Navy Class VP Long Range Patrol Seaplane,” Convair, 1 April 1946
Document: “Space Shuttle: What Will It Do?” A 1970’s brochure describing the Shuttle, with six full-color full page illustrations
Art: McDonnell-Douglas lithograph of “NASA Earth Orbital Space Station”
CAD Diagram: Northrop Grumman Next Generation Long Range Strike
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
And as happens far too often, I’ve been remiss in my PR campaign. The rewards for July, released a month ago, included:
Document: “C-5 Galaxy Pocket Guide,” brochure giving info on the C-5
Document: GDIC-64 O29-21, “Alighting Gear Convair Model 48 Light Armed Reconnaissance Airplane,” an illustrated report on the landing gear for Convairs competitor for the OV-10
Document: “Police Department Lecture #3 Effects of Atomic Weapons,” an early-50’s paper describing what NYC could expect int he event of a nuclear strike
Diagram: EMW “Wasserfall,” German WWII surface to air guided missile
Thanks to ebay and my fabulously lean bank account, I have recently procured a number of items of potential interest:
“NASA Earth Orbital Space Station,” a poster-sized lithograph from McDonnell Douglas depicting a space station that tumbles for artificial-G.
“Re-Entry Payload Launch Vehicle,” A *brief* General Dynamics presentation on a vehicle to launch re-entry vehicles such as MIRV warhead shapes
“Proposed Development Program on Rocket-Type Missiles,” a 1948 Convair report on early ballistic/boost glide missile concepts, that would lead to Atlas. Includes some fantastic large format layout diagrams.
“Detail Specification for Consolidated Vultee Model 117 Airplane Class VR Transport Flying Boat,” August 1950, all the details on the then-brand new Tradewind.
“Detail Specification for Class VP Long Range Patrol Seaplane,” Consolidated Vultee 1946, all the details on a proposed flying boat patrol/bomber
32 issues of “Astronautics” magazine from 1957 to 1969, mostly 57-59 and 63 or so.
The lithograph and the reports will be scanned and put forward for consideration for monthly rewards; the magazines will have the interesting bits scanned and made available to the subscribers/patrons.
“Our heroes aircraft is falling from the sky! Will they pull out in time to avoid a firey crash and bring the episode, nay, the entire series, to a screeching and unexpected halt, requiring not only clever writing but also difficult actor contract negotiations with the attendant risk of turning off the existing fans?”
Bah. No, of course the aircraft will pull out at the last second. Of course.
Lazy.
Those old enough to remember TV from the 80’s will doubtless *vaguely* recall any of a number of the same scene: the *enemy* aircraft, often a helicopter, has been struck. Gun, missile, onboard explosion, someone whacked the pilot, whatever, the vehicle is going down. Will it crash? Well, since these are the bad guys and, what’s more, *unimportant* bad guy characters, yes. It’ll crash. But at the last moment it’ll go down *behind* the nearest hill. You’ll know it crashed because a fireball that sure looks a whole lot like some combination of back powder and gasoline will go FOOOOM from behind the hill. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than crashing an actual aircraft on camera, and slightly less visually awful than using bad scale models or, perhaps worse, stock footage, to depict the event. But it still got to be an incredibly tired and predictable shot.
A video started making the rounds online a day or two ago. It shows an airline passenger nightmare: the little kid behind you not only kicking your seat, but the lil’ monsters mother not only doing nothing to stop that behavior, she’s aggressive in preventing anyone else from stopping it.
A number of commenters are using the video to discuss this or that: race relations, the lack of fathers, the lack of discipline, the power and arrogance of the matriarchy, etc. All valid issues to discuss, but there’s one little issue: that ain’t an airplane. Jetliners don’t have slab-sided walls, nor do they have support columns. It’s a set, and they’re actors.
It’s a “comedy” video, though nothing about it seemed all that funny; it just doesn’t seem to be played for laughs, but for realism. The “Beverly Hills Comedy Team” has a number of airliner-based vids using the same set. The full length vid is on Facebook:
Starships first not-exactly-successful launch was filmed not only from the ground, but from the NASA WB-57 flying at altitude. Apparently at least five cameras were trained on the launcher; video from two have been released, while three remain classified. i would *assume* that the classified three display some combination of:
Even with the somewhat dodgy tracking and potato-quality images, these are interesting. You really get a sense of how Starship flopped around the sky at the end there. Which was both sad and incredibly impressive… no other rocket would have survived as long flying *sideways.*
I fully support the manufacture of newly designed, modernized PBY “Catalina” flying boats. Damned things were awesome 80 years ago; had I buckets of money, I’d fund the program myself. But *this* program does not inspire a great deal of (i.e “any”) confidence. All they show are a few *very* low re and simplistic CG renders of a modernized PBY… lacking the braces that kept the parasol wing from snapping off during maneuvers. I know materials have advanced a lot since the 1930’s, but come *on,* that design just don’t look right without those braces.
Recall that just over a year ago an Australian company said they were going to remanufacture the Grumman Albatross flying boat. The last “news” update to their website was December of 2022.
