My next set of pubs to be released will include a little something on these…
Nov 242014
Nov 212014
In mid-December the Syfy channel will run a three-night miniseries called “Ascension.” The idea seems interesting enough… in 1963, with JFK freaking out that nuclear war was soon going to wipe out mankind, the US secretly launched a starship on a 100-year mission to another system. Little snippets have been shown of the show; of course it’s much more “human drama” (they’re 50 years into their mission and the first murder happens, there’s social trouble on board, lots of unrealistically sexy people having sex, etc.) than actual science fiction, but I was curious to see what the ship would be. until recently only a part of the ship had been visible int he available trailers, but Syfy has released some videos that show that it is in fact an Orion-type nuclear pulse vehicle. It’s a ship the size of the Empire State Building, and with decks laid out like in a skyscraper (a whole bunch of small decks stacked atop each other as opposed to a smaller number of really long decks, like on a cruise ship).
The science… well, she seems to be the science we’ve come to expect from Syfy, even though David Brin is the tech advisor. They’re fifty years into their mission, and the claim is that they are now at the point of no return… when in reality that point would have been very, very soon after the *beginning* of the mission. The ship also has gravity, oriented as in a skyscraper; this is done either by Magic Gravity Generators (1963? bah) or by having the ship *still* under a 1-g acceleration (after fifty years of that, ship time, they would have crossed the known universe thanks to the beauty of relativity… see HERE for the math), which seems to be the approach based on what Brin said.
So unless the imagery is inaccurate and it’s actually tumbling to generate G’s… well, there it is, I suppose. Some vids:
[youtube uXT0QGLh5c4]
[youtube AJqQ4OdPcAo]
[youtube MU4g6jJpx3M]
And some screenshots illustrating the ship:
A display model showing the ship. It’s not a precise match for the ship shown in space, though. 
A series of pullback shots, starting at a window up front.
Interior of the “good” part of the ship.
Two views of something that doesn’t look like the Ascension. Maybe the Soviet equivalent, bopping along out there? Or the Ascension 2, built circa 2014?
Because every starship needs to have a deck where people shovel stuff into furnaces. The Enterprise D had one. oh, sure, they never showed it, but that was only because the Federation is really good at covering up the grungier stuff. But there were *hundreds* of sweaty, meaty guys below the engineering deck shovelling dark matter pellets into the Enterprises boilers.
Looks like something to add to the Nuclear Pulse Propulsion book.
Nov 192014
The latest releases in the “US Projects” line (see the full library HERE):
USTP 02
Issue #02 of US Transport Projects, done in the same format as US Bomber Projects, USTP will cover flying vehicles designed to transport cargo, passengers and troops. Issue 02 includes:
- Jupiter Troop Transport: A 1956 Army concept for ballistically launched soldiers
- Catamaran 747: A NASA concept for a more efficient twin-fuselage 747
- Nuclear C-5A: A NASA concept for using the existing C-5 to demonstrate nuclear powered flight
- Boeing 765-076E: A recent design for a small supersonic transport
- Lockheed L-151: An early jetliner concept adding six turbojets to a Constellation
- AAFRL/Lockheed AMC-X: A recent design for a stealthy C-130 replacement
- Boeing Twin Hull Airship: A 1970’s design for a semi-buoyant cargo lifter
- Douglas D5.0-15A: A partially NASP-derived hypersonic jetliner
USTP #02 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
——–
—————————-
USSP 01
Also available: issue #01 of US Spacecraft Projects. This series will present some of the wide range of manned and unmanned probes, stations, landers, spaceplanes and so on that have been designed over the decades. Issue #01 includes:
- General Dynamics 2-Man Space Taxi: A concept for the minimum possible manned spacecraft
- General Dynamics EMPIRE lander: one of the earliest designs for an excursion module to and from the surface of Mars
- Convair Landing Boat: Krafft Ehricke’s Atlas-launched spaceplane
- Zenith Star: the SDI laser battlestation experiment
- Northrop PROFAC: a flying gas station for spacecraft
- NASA Warp-drive spacecraft: a highly hypothetical concept for planning purposes
- Martin Direct Flight Apollo: lunar landing without the LEM
- Boeing DS-1 Satellite Interceptor: an early Dyna Soar with nuclear missiles
USSP #01 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
——–
Nov 142014
Pentagon Studies Reveal Major Nuclear Problems
The high point: apparently it takes a special wrench to tighten the (presumably explosive) bolts that hold warheads onto the Minuteman ICBM. That’s not the problem. The problem is that there was only *one* of these wrenches, and the technicians FedExed this single wrench from site to site as needed.
That’s greeeeeeeaaaaaaaat.
Nov 062014
Two current projects…
Oct 302014
Photos of the Athena missile (which is apparently at least partly replica) on display in Green River, Utah. The little remembered Green River Launch Complex was used for test launches, shooting missiles like the Athena and Pershing into White Sands, New Mexico. In the case of the Athena, many of the launches tested subscale advanced re-entry vehicles (nuclear warhead re-entry vehicles, specifically). I’ve posted the full set of 12 full-rez photos for all patrons at the APR Patreon.
Oct 272014
The “lander” of the Messiah. A tiny part of the whole vehicle, but much of the detail goes here.
Oct 242014
I have – I *think* – just corrected an error in the listing that should open sales up worldwide. If some of all y’all furriners would like to take a look and see if it’s still unavailable, that’d be helpful. Note, though, that USBP#02 has been uploaded and is going through review… and – again I *think* – should be far better in terms of image resolution. If I get confirmation from a customer or three that #2 is better than #1, I will re-upload #1. I don’t know if previous purchasers can download the new, better version or not…
#2 took freakin’ *forever* to get properly formatted. I couldn’t find a way to get the “Caliber” converter on my computer to *not* reduce the image resolution, so I had to use the Amazon system directly, which meant uploading the thing and waiting for it to process, then looking through the annoyingly slow previewer for the innumerable and mysterious formatting issues. After around 20 cycles of this, I *think* I’ve got it hammered into shape with full-rez images. So while this is formatted and laid out differently from the standard PDF version, the image quality should be as good.
Unless something screwy happens (and, gosh, when has *that* ever happened), USBP#2 should be available on Amazon in the next some hours. I have high hopes of being asleep at the time. So if you’d like to be the first kid on your block with a copy, or want to help out be getting a copy early and providing feedback (if so, thanks), just search for “US Bomber Projects” on Amazon.
My plan at this time is to keep publications at Amazon about five or six issues behind those on my website.
Oct 142014
An interesting thought experiment:
What Would Happen If the 20 Biggest US Cities Were Wiped Out With Nukes
In short: Jihadists wander off with 20 45-kiloton Pakistani nukes and detonate them in 20 carefully chosen major US cities. The end result is million dead, the relocation of the Capitol to Denver, the collapse of the US economy, a series of Constitutional crises over succession after much of the chain of command is wiped out, a US military response that takes out a chunk of Pakistan.
The variables are too many to guess at, but I could see the US military response to such a situation range anywhere from virtually nil, to lashing out with a whole bunch of Trident missiles raining nukyular death all over the middle east.
Oct 142014
Not long ago, I was alerted to a pair of eBay auctions for vintage blueprints of “Supersonic Escape Capsules.” The blueprints, produced by the US Army Air Forces, depict models of the capsules made from plexiglas and plywood. This would be generally interesting to me, but one of the diagrams seemed to indicate that the diagrams might not be what they said they were. Instead, it looked a *lot* like an aerodynamically improved “Fat Man” atom bomb. I suspected that what was for sale were actually test or display models of early atom bomb casings, intentionally mis-described for security reasons. I managed to score both blueprints with surprisingly minimal fuss.
Upon receipt of the blueprints, my suspicion that at least one of them depicts an evolved Fat Man seems to have been misplaced. Fat Man was about 60 inches in diameter; the model is 38.5 inches in diameter, which would make for an odd scale. But the idea of a supersonic escape capsule being studied in 1946 is also odd, since the USAAF was years from having supersonic aircraft. And the configurations don’t really seem to work as escape capsules; typically such things are the entire cockpit which can break away from the aircraft, but these would make for very unfortunate cockpits for supersonic aircraft. So at the current time I can’t quite figure this one out. I’ll continue to see if I can run down info on this, but leads are few.
I have not scanned in these blueprints yet. They’ve been folded up longer than most of the people reading this have been alive, so it’ll take a good long time to flatten them out and make them safe for scanning. But I’ve taken some photos, which I’ve made available in full rez in a ZIP archive for all of my APR Patreon patrons. The APR Patreon page is HERE. If you want to help preserve and make available obscure aerospace history items such as these, please consider contributing to the APR Patreon. For as little as $0.75/month, you can help out, plus gain access to a bunch of aerospace “rewards” like these. You can also help out by helping to spread the word.
The first “escape capsule” on a quite good vintage blueprint. The resemblance to “Fat Man” is obvious… but likely dubious. It’s a close match to the Davy Crockett warhead from a decade later.
The second “escape capsule,” on a larger and more badly faded blueprint.
One of the problems with photographing large format blueprints is the almost inevitable groupies. Cats like paper. Cats *love* crinkly paper. And 70-year-old vellum blueprints are the crinkliest of crinkly paper. Fortunately, no damage done.