Jun 292015
 

I’ve been pecking away at various aspects of Pax Orionis lately. Most of my writing has been involved with various aspects of the history leading up to The War. I could have started with the war first, and backfilled the history after, but it seems to me better to start at the beginning, work through the course of events leading to the war, and then staging the war with the world that the history gives.

Since the US fights the war with Orion ships, I figure it’s a good idea to figure out how many ships the US has, of what type, and what their capabilities are. Below is a very preliminary chart of the ships of the USSF and NASA in chronological and to scale. Names and numbers will likely change; the designs are currently in flux. The double vertical line at the right indicates the war, so the two craft introduced after that are post-war designs.

pax orionis-Model

 Posted by at 3:45 pm
Jun 282015
 

Well, this isn’t so good. It’s not the usual sort of explosion, where there’s a very sudden fireball and the vehicle turns into confetti in a split second; this disaster seems to be stretched out over a few seconds. It kinda looks like there was a fuel or oxidizer dump from up front… perhaps the second stage. Also early on in the “anomaly” you can see something drop away from the vehicle. I wonder if perhaps that’s the Dragon capsule? The disaster was good and slow… *perhaps* the abort systems got the capsule away. But I’d imagine if that was the case the booster itself would have *promptly* turned into so much tinfoil.

UPDATE: A tweet from Elon Musk says that there was an “overpressure event” in the second stage LOX tank. Cause was “counterintuitive.”

Another angle:

 Posted by at 8:51 am
Jun 272015
 

For APR Patrons, here’s what you now have available:

Documents: 2 General Electric reports on nuclear turbojets, *packed* with diagrams

Document: Mercury/Redstone booster recovery

Large diagram: 2 this time… “Long Tank Delta” space launch rocket and “Honest John” battlefield nuclear missile

CAD diagram: Convair “FISH,” 1958 configuration

If you’d like to access these and many others, or if you’d simply like to help the cause of recovering and making available forgotten aerospace ephemera such as this, please check out the APR Patreon page.

patreon-200

2015-06 ad

 Posted by at 9:50 pm
Jun 272015
 

An RCS Energia video describing a capsule that, it is claimed, will fly in 2021 atop the new Angara 5A rocket. Given that it’s in Russian, I don’t know what they’re going on about, but the video seems to be aimed at pointing out the advantages of stowable flat screens for the instruments.

Boy does it look familiar…

 Posted by at 7:12 pm
Jun 272015
 

Remember that demonstration you must have seen at least once in high school or junior high when your chemistry teach blew a cloud of something seemingly harmless like flour through a small flame, and created a big ol’ fireball?

Like so:

 

Seems like not everyone got the memo on that.

More than 225 injured in explosion at Taiwan water park

Seems a big cloud of powdered dye or paint or something was blown over a crowd at a concert. Result: firey hijinks.

 

 

 Posted by at 12:48 pm