Aerospace Projects Review issue V3N4 now available

aircraft, APR, art, awesomeness, drawings, history, new products, news, projects, rockets, secrets, spacecraft 31 Responses »

Jun 162014

At last: Aerospace Projects Review issue V3N4 is available. This issue has 128 pages. The main article focuses on the Boeing Model 844-2050E, the final, almost-built version of the X-20 Dyna Soar spaceplane. Included are not only detailed diagrams showing the design and construction of the spaceplane, but also drawings and information on proposed operational versions, including passenger ferries, satellite inspectors/interceptors, even nuclear bomber versions.

Also included are a large number of all-new diagrams that finally show the Dyna Soar atop the Titan IIIC accurately and in detail, along with proposed variants, variant launch systems and suggested space stations.

An article by Bill Slayton on the Lockheed CL-295 design series. This was a series of tailsitter VTOL fighters including designs derived from the F-104 as well as wholly new designs.

The third article is on the McDonnell F-4(FVS),a mid-1960’s concept to replace the low-mounted fixed wing of the F-4 Phantom II with an all-new variable geometry “swing wing.” The story goes from the F-4(FVS) in its numerous incarnations through the Model 225, McDonnell-Douglas’ entry into the 1968 US Navy VFX contest which resulted in the F-14.

Also, Aerospace History Nuggets on the US Navy SCAT VTOL and the Republic Aircraft RAC-730 SSTO aerospaceplane.

23 megabyte PDF file

Here’s the complete issue V3N4 layout:

It is available in three formats. Firstly, it can be downloaded directly from me for the low, low price of $10.00. Second, it can be purchased as a professionally printed volume through Magcloud; third, it can be procured in both formats. To get the download, simply pay for it here through paypal.

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To get the printed version (or print + PDF version), visit my MagCloud page:

http://scottlowther.magcloud.com/

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Also available: the V3N4 Addendum. This contains 49 pages formatted for 11X17. Includes larger and improved versions of all the CAD diagrams produced for V3N4, as well as larger versions of some of the illustrations from the X-20 and F-4(FVS) articles (as well as a number of illustrations that did not appear in the X-20 article):

The V3N4 Addendum can be downloaded for only $4.00!
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Northrop Flying Wing Airliner

aircraft, history, projects, youtube 9 Responses »

Jun 152014

Here’s another one of those “I was sure I’d posted it before, but now can’t seem to find it” items…

A 1948 promo video by Northrop showing a mockup of a passenger compartment to be built into a B-49-style flying wing. Very spacious, and with one heck of a view to the front and rear, but of course none to the side. The idea of flying wing airliners keeps popping up, but also keeps never happening. There are several decent reasons for this:

1) It’s more difficult to pressurize the non-cylindrical passenger compartment, meaning that it’ll weigh more (and thus negate some of the weight savings of using a flying wing)

2) Configurations like this won’t fit quite so conveniently at most airports. The jetways will have a hard time mating up.

3) Most of the passengers won’t have any sort of view at all, it’d be like flying in a cargo container.

4) The further a passenger is left or right from the centerline, the more disconcerting and uncomfortable rolling maneuvers will be for them.

5) It’s different. The Dash-80 (the prototype for what became the KC-135 and 707) set the basic configuration for the modern jetliner in 1954… 60 years ago. The most modern jetliners don’t really look any different. And like it or not, “convention” matters.

Northrop drawings of this jetliner are HERE.

[youtube JMTwQ9b5hvk]

Go ahead, patronize me

APR, blather, history, Hmm..., new products, news, projects 3 Responses »

Jun 152014

I’ve slapped together a Patreon “campaign,” but I have not yet launched it. However, I’ve stitched together the screenshots of the thing, shown below, listing the “milestones” and the “rewards” I’m considering. In short, I have a fairly good sized library of stuff I’m fairly certain would appeal to a fair number of folks, and this would be a way to get it all scanned and cleaned and posted and whatnot. The way this works, the more an individual contributes, the higher the quality of product they’ll get, and the more the total contributions, the faster the rate stuff will be put out there. The specifics might change, but I think this is a proper sort of setup.

If you have a suggestion or any sort of comment at all, feel free. Advertising, marketing, all that stuff… not my area. So if you see something stupid, or something that could be better, let me know.

Title Block 1: Bell Model 40 (XP-83)

aircraft, art, drawings, drawings&documents, history, projects 1 Response »

Jun 152014

Somewhere over a year ago, I was contacted by someone making some period-accurate blueprints (I forget the exact project, though), meant to replicate the look of something from the American aerospace industry in the 1940’s-50’s. I gathered together a bunch of my scanned blueprints from the era and put together a collection of the title blocks. These are the small grids often visible in the lower righthand corner of blueprints that give all the pertinent info about the drawing. The title blocks not only vary considerably from company to company, but from year to year, division to division, even from one drawing to the next and one draftsman to the next. Sometimes the title blocks were drawn in by the draftsman, sometimes they were printed in advance on the drafting paper, sometimes they were pre-printed “stickers.”

Because someone else might have use for ’em… here ya go, the first of the bunch. This is from a 1944 Bell Aircraft layout diagram of the Model 40 jet fighter, which became the XP-83 (the whole diagram is available as Air Drawing 59 HERE).

NASA SST film, 1966

aircraft, history, projects, youtube 1 Response »

Jun 142014

An educational/promotional film from NASA describes the Supersonic Transport program as of 1966. Of interest are the wind tunnel models: they’re are the size of jet fighters. They don’t make ’em like that anymore…

[youtube u9BjJaDlOaQ]

Early LEM concept art

art, history, projects, rockets, spacecraft 6 Responses »

Jun 132014

Very early. I would be entirely unsurprised if this has no basis in engineering, just artistic license. The “descent stage/ascent stage” ratio seems really, really off. Comes from a NASA PR brochure, date unclear.

See high-rez HERE.

1959 Large solid propellant booster: part 1

drawings, history, projects, rockets, spacecraft No Responses »

Jun 102014

In the runup to the Saturn program, American aerospace companies studied every possible variation on large launch vehicles. One idea that seemed promising was the use of large solid rocket motors, singly or in clusters, to form large booster stages. It was sensible enough… in the late 1950s large solid rockets were better developed than large liquid rockets. Solids can put out truly monstrous levels of thrust, and reasonably reliably; and they require minimal preparation once stacked up and ready to go. In contrast, liquid rockets are complex and finicky, but with the advantage of substantially higher specific impulse.

In 1959 Lockheed released the results of an early study for NASA on a series of large boosters using solid rocket motors. They studied a range of vehicles, with 2, 3 and 4 stages; 300,000, 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 pound gross weights, and targeting 300 nautical mile circular orbits, geosynchronous, escape and soft lunar landings.

Shown below are diagrams of 1,000,000-pound gross weight boosters using 180-inch diameter solid first stages (440,000 pounds of propellant) and liquid upper stages (LOX/RP-1 or LOX/LH2 for the second stage and LOX/LH2 for the third). Payload weights were given for representative vehicles rather than specific designs.

Payload: 39,800 pounds to 300 n.m.; 9,400 pounds to geosynchronous; 12,400 to escape; 3,900 pounds to soft lunar landing

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Payload: 51,500 pounds to 300 n.m.

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Payload: 39,800 pounds to 300 n.m.; 9,400 pounds to geosynchronous; 12,400 to escape; 3,900 pounds to soft lunar landing

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Payload: 15,000 pounds to geosynchronous; 18,400 pounds to escape; 5,600 pounds to soft lunar landings

Again with the Hans Kammler

blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., history, Hmm..., projects, rockets, science, science fiction, weapons, ಠ_ಠ 9 Responses »

Jun 102014

General Hans Kammler was a high ranking bureaucrat in the Nazi regime, in charge of developing the death camps and, by the end of the war, in charge of production of the V-2 rocket and jet engines. At the end of the war, he vanished, reported having killed himself rather than be captured. One of a whole lot of Nazi scumbags who simply disappeared under a mountain of corpses.

But over the years, Kammler has been kinda like the Elvis of Nazis: he keeps being reported to have survived the war, having escaped to Antarctica, or escaped to South America or having escaped on an alien flying saucer or a time machine, whatever the inventor of the tale thinks will make him a buck. Well, huzzah, there’s a new one:

Did US fake top Nazi’s WWII suicide and spirit him away to get hands on Hitler’s secret weapons programme?

The idea here is that the US quietly took Kammler to the US to help with rocket programs and the like. And it’s of course true that the US did bring a whole lot of German scientists and engineers and their data to the US for the purpose of aiding with American research programs. But there is a massive problem with this hypothesis for Kammler: He would have been useless.

Kammler was a civil engineer. That’s why he designed death camps… at its heart, a large camp (“death” or otherwise) is a matter for people who know how to build buildings and transportation infrastructure and the like. But the US had no need for death camps, nor the expertise on how to make them. The US was *loaded* with civil engineers. We didn’t need more. What we need were weapons designers… aeronautical and mechanical engineers, physicists, chemists.

(As we said back in my college days, aerospace engineers make weapons. Civil engineers make targets.)

During his stint running the V-2 and turbojet programs, he was in charge of seeing to it that production of these complex devices that required unusual alloys was successfully carried out. But here again, it would have been a useless skill in the US. If there was anything the US was good at in 1945, it was building things in large numbers at high quality on a budget. Scrounging for rare alloys? Just buy ’em. Rounding up slave labor? Not an issue.

Kammler probably didn’t know a damn thing about what made the weapons work or the physics behind them; nor did he need to. That wasn’t his job. And the job he did do… the US didn’t need.

So while I suppose it’s possible that the US took Kammler, there would have simply been no point in it. Those we took in Project Paperclip we were quite open about. Von Braun and his team were plastered all over the pages of Life and Time. If Kammler made it to the US, he can probably be found in a shallow grave somewhere in the Texas desert with a 0.45 inch diameter hole in the center of his forehead, buried shortly after arrival when they figured out just what a useless tool he was.

APR V3N4 previews

aircraft, APR, blather, drawings, history, new products, news, projects, spacecraft No Responses »

Jun 082014

I’m getting close to being done with this one. The main article, clearly, is the one on the Model 2050E Dyna Soar, the second far smaller article is on the McDonnell F-4(FVS) and derivatives, the third is the old Bill Slayton CL-295 article from the original version of APR. There will be a few more small pieces, not shown here.

Issue V3N5 will almost certainly be smaller than this. Apart from the Lunar Gemini article, it will likely be composed of a number of all-new smaller articles. I’d like to move forward a short article from further down the run to this one, due to having some new info, but that info is embargoed by the source till later in the year. It’d be nice to get back on the two-month schedule for APR, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.

RF-4X

aircraft, art, projects 2 Responses »

Jun 072014

An illustration of the proposed RF-4X from the early 1970s. This was to be a highly modified version of the F-4E Phantom II capable of attaining Mach 3 for short periods. This would be possible by used more advanced inlets with water injection for pre-compressor cooling. The water would be stored in conformal tanks above the fuselage. The RF-4X would be a recon platform for the Israelies, sort of a low-budget, less stealthy SR-71.