Maybe coming soon to Fantastic Plastic, the recently “unveiled” SR-72.
Nov 032013
Oct 302013
Shazam.
The next issue of APR is still a long ways away. But I’m thinking of making the drawings available sooner.
Oct 302013
Artwork of a three-stage rocket designed by Krafft Ehricke around 1953. 126 feet tall, it would be capable of orbiting 11,000 pounds of payload into a 600 mile circular orbit. Liftoff weight would be 1.3 million pounds.
The first stage, here being shown dropped, would be parachute recovered. the second stage would be expended; the third stage would be used to built up a space station. If you can’t immediately tell where stage 2 ends and stage 3 begins, it’s because stage 3 is the central cylinder, with stage 2 being wrapped around it. This sort of staging arrangement was considered fairly often in the days before they actually had to build these things.
It would be able to land 3,000 pounds on the moon or shoot 5,000 pound probes past Mars or Venus.
Oct 292013
On the list of the hazards to manned spaceflight – and to photovoltaic arrays and integrated circuits – are the Van Allen radiation belts. These belts, from about 1000 km to 60,000 km above the surface, are the results of the Earths magnetosphere snagging energetic electrons blasted from the sun and protons that are the result of cosmic rays smacking the upper atmosphere. The electrons form a high beta radiation flux, enough to fry unshielded electronic and humans who spend too much time there. This flux is high enough that satellite being shot into higher orbits have a good fraction of the lifetime degradation of their solar arrays done just in the few hours it takes to transit the belts. The belts consume a vast volume of real estate that I’m sure a lot of satellites would love to occupy. But what can be done?
Well… drain ’em, apparently.
Tethers Unlimited, a company co-founded by the late physicist Robert Forward (who I had the chance to meet a few times), studied the use of conductive tethers to sweep out regions of the belts. By charging the tethers to a high voltage, electrons would be kicked away at high speed, enough to leave the belts permanently. I don’t know whether this would work, but it seems feasible, and I can’t see how it would have any real “environmental” effects. The only thing that occurs to me: it seems the electrons would be kicked away in essentially random directions, some up, some down. So… if they launched a couple dozen of these things, they’d be swinging through the sky, blasting electrons every which way. So at twilight, you could look up into the darkening (or lightening) sky and see a miles-long tether, brightly lit by the sun, cruising overhead. And deeper into darkness, after the tethers themselves are in darkness, might you still be able to detect them? Perhaps you wouldn’t see the tethers directly, but the electrons that they kick *down* would smack into the upper atmosphere and create faint aurora. A faint circle of auroral glow? A comet-tail? Dunno…
In any event, these things would not be in permanent operation, but periodic. The electrons that populate the belts are injected into it by solar flares and such; drain the belts, and it may well take a good long time for them to fill back up again.
Oct 262013
In 1968, Boeing (manufacturer of the S-IC stage of the Saturn V) put out an illustration of advanced derivatives of the Saturn V. Published in the XIXth International Astronautical Congress, these included the Saturn V-25(S)U, which was a stretched Saturn V with improved F-1 and J-2 engines, with four 156″ diameter solid rocket boosters; the Saturn V/4-260, which used the same improved Saturn V, but with four 260″ diameter solid rocket boosters, with additional first stage liquid propellant in tankage ahead of the solid boosters. Additionally, the payload shroud could be increased in diameter from ten meters to 78 feet,and up to 290 feet in length. Further included was the Saturn V-XU, which was four improved Saturn V’s clustered together (both first and second stages), with a payload shroud 86.5 feet in diameter and 240 feet long; and an all-new Post-Saturn concept with a 75-foot-diameter core vehicle with optional 260″ diameter solid rocket boosters (up to twelve) and a payload shroud up to 120 feet in diameter. A payload of up to 4.2 million pounds was envisioned.
Two length options were shown… 410 feet and 500 feet. The 410 foot-long vehicles could be assembled within the VAB; the 500 foot-long vehicles would require that the payload be stacked onto the vehicle outside the VAB using a new crane mounted to the VAB roof.
Oct 242013
Oct 222013
OK, most of what was lost has been redrawn.
Oct 212013
After the CAD screwup, I’ve been working on recovering what I lost. The image below shows status as of a few minutes ago. The TIII/156 is back. The TIII/early is back. The TIII/operational is mostly back. The Dyna Soar overview and DS/Transstage overview weren’t lost. The inboard profile lost much. Now lost are the Saturn, “Skylab,” 932-102 and 934-606. They’ll have to be redrawn from scratch. The other ones listed will need to be created more or less from scratch, but weren’t lost in the screwup. There will be others as well, to be created not via 2D AutoCAD but via 3D Rhino. That model, fortunately, was unaffected.
This has been a schedule-bomber. If you want to see me obsessed, see me after I lose something I didn’t want to lose; I tend to go “grrrr” and devote myself to getting it back, at the expense of whatever else I needed to be doing. It messes with my sense of the way the universe aught to be. Of course, sometimes what’s lost *can’t* be recovered (go ahead and *try* to bring back the dead, for example), and that can make a permanent mess of things. I get caught in sort of a neurological do-loop; “just get over it” not being a function built into my programming.
Oct 192013
Oct 192013
Fantastic Plastic has re-released some kits I mastered for ’em:
This is a “missile only” lower-cost version of the earlier kit.
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And FP posted photos of the still-available SPECTRE rocket, assembled and painted (really well) by a customer:
