… on the BoMi and BWB drawing booklets:
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:
Oct 192013
For what it’s worth:
I’m constantly tinkering with line settings, but I’ve largely settled on the results shown below. I do my drawings in AutoCAD 2000 and then further processing in Paint Shop Pro. The lines in ACAD are split into several layers:
1) “Outline:” This is for, obviously, the main outlines. This includes major overlaps, such as engine nacelles in front of wings of fuselages and such. Also used for sharp intersections, such as some wing/body intersections, when the angle of intersection is greater than 45 degrees. “Outline” is White (which prints black) with a lineweight of 0.40 mm.
2) “Details:” used for things like control surfaces, doors, windows, etc. Also used for intersections at less than 45 degrees. Also White, with a “default” lineweight.
3) “Lines:” Used for panels lines, faint intersections and the like. uses Color 253 (medium gray) and a default lineweight.
The process for going from ACAD 2000 to a good raster image is more complex than it would seem to need to be; I imagine more recent versions of ACAD have cleaned the process up. Anyway:
1) Plot the drawing as an EPS file at ANSI C size (22X17 inches)
2) Open the drawing in Paint Shop Pro at 200 dpi, grayscale, no transparency.
3) Crop the image just at the outer border
The image just as-is is then saved as a GIF or PNG (not JPG, as that entails loss). It can then be plastered directly into a Word document. The drawing will print out (on paper) at a chosen scale if the border was drawn at a specific size, and when put into Word the image is formatted to be that width. If you want to print at a specific scale but don’t wnat the border, you can still go through the whole process with a border, and then simply erase it /paint it out at the last step so that the image has the right size but no border.
I’ve found plotting the CAD drawing at larger sizes initially helps smooth out curves. But this means that the image is way too big for basic online posting, and the line weights get really thin and faint when the image is just resized smaller. So before resizing smaller one or both of the following:
1) “Erode” the image. This expands line widths. At full rez it looks pretty crappy, but when resized it works well.
2) “Blur” the image. This widens the lines and helps smooth it out, but makes everything lighter. The image can be darkened via gamma correction or brightness/contrast.
Something else to consider: “Drawing Order.” With multiple line colors, it matters what lines are “over” and “under” what other lines. After the drawing is done in ACAD, the “draworder” commend lets you pick what lines are in front, what are in back. It’s best to have the “Outline” layer in front, and the “Lines” layer in back. This way, when a black Outline line intersects with a gray “Lines” line, the black line is unbroken. Sometimes I forget this step, and the results can look *wrong.*
The image below of the Lockheed CL-1170-6-2 was from issue V1N3 of Aerospace Projects Review, reformatted in AutoCAD to print out on 11X17.
Oct 182013
X-20 Dyna Soar. Model being made for the purposes of illustrating the next issue of APR. Dunno if there’s enough interest in a physical model to make a stab at it, though a cutaway model showing the truss-structure innards – a thing only possible via 3D printing – seems appealing. Note that the heat panel lines are being modeled in place, so they should appear on any theoretical 3D print, and definitely appear on rendered illustrations.
Further progress on the Prometheus, mostly tinkering on the engines. You know what? These components are nightmares. But the final model is gonna be *awesome.*
So if you’ve been wondering why my blogging about old aerospace projects has fallen off of late… here ya go.
Oct 172013
Very little has emerged from the Strategic Defense Initiative days revealing *actual* weapons designs. With the exception of some of the Brilliant Pebbles and Zenith Star designs, almost nothing apart from unreliable artwork has been released. On occasion, though, bits have come out. Three neutral particle beam satellite weapon concepts were shown, in low-rez and frustrating detail, in a report on power systems for SDI use.
The Martin-Marietta NPB concept:
The Ge/Lockheed NPB concept:
The TRW concept:
The drawings are too small to glean details such as full-scale dimensions, or even get a really good handle on layouts. The GE/Lockheed design seems to come equipped with large panels, presumably radiators, held within a triangular cross-section framework. The Martin and TRW concepts appear to be roughly cylindrical. And unlike the majority of the artwork produced for public consumption, here you can make out the nuclear reactors meant to power the systems.
While dimensions are either unavailable or illegible in these illustrations, two show the SP-100 reactor and associated radiator system. The radiators change from illustration to illustration of the SP-100, so cannot be firmly relied upon as a scale reference, and the Sp-100 reactor itself is little more than a dot, but this illustration of the SP-100 should help to give a rough idea how big it, and by extension the NPB concepts, were going to be.
Oct 162013
Until Friday, I’m running a sale on US Bomber Projects. There are currently 4 issues available for $4 each; for the duration of the sale, get all four for only $12.
Oct 162013
Status, via photos and screenshots, of various model projects I’m working on.
