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.

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.

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.

~~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.~~

Status, via photos and screenshots, of various model projects I’m working on.

What you call a “slow news day:”

Converted Ballistic Missiles Could Launch Aid to Disaster Zones

Before anyone gets too worked up, this idea springs not from some tax-dollar-spewing government think-tank, but from a grad student in Tokyo.

The idea: a natural disaster strikes the Middle of Nowhere. Ships will take forever to get there; planes can’t. So… put medicine, electrical generators, whatever, onto the fronts of decommissioned ICBMs and launch into the disaster zone. Supplies can be on-site in an hour or less. One one hand… sure, you could do that. On the other hand… ah… no.

1) Launching ICBMs can make other nations twitchy.

2) ICBMs, even decommissioned ones, are *expensive* and the payloads are small.

3) How good is your targetting? And is a generator falling out of the sky what the people on the ground really need?

4) Airplanes can be there in a few hours. If they can’t land – rough terrain, no runways, etc. – they can always do the Berlin Air Lift Candy Bomber thing and chuck relief supplies out the back under parachute.

Personally, my biggest issue is #2. Unless your Intercontenental Ballistic Package Delivery System is kept in a state of constant readiness – and that’ll cost a lot – it’s going to take a long time to get it ready to launch. So ICBMs just seem a poor choice here. However… there is a forthcoming alternative: rocketplanes.

The likes of XCOR’s “Lynx” suborbital rocketplane will, if it works out, turn out to be a vehicle with performance that at least kinda-sorta approximates ICBMs, and will by definition be kept in a virtually constant state of readiness, and will by definition be relatively cheap. Lynx is rather small, of course, and on its own couldn’t carry much very far; but put an upper stage on it, as XCOR plans to do, and you can put a payload into orbit… or halfway across the planet. Does this make economic and logistical sense? Well… still, probably “no.” But I think it makes less un-sense than expending an ICBM. And Lynx will, hopefully, be just the first, small generation; follow-on craft will be bigger and more capable. I can imagine that a successful suborbital tourism rocketplane might lead to a 737-sized suborbital transport rocketplane, carrying a few dozen passengers across oceans in a matter of minutes; this sort of vehicle would, with the aid of a simple pop-up stage, be able to toss quite a payload of band-aids at a disaster zone.

Of course, if such a system becomes available, it’ll still need to be kept in a state of readiness. And how best to do that? By constant operations. Going on a century ago, a lot of people were sure that the future of rocketry was bound up in postal rockets… shooting mail across the miles via rocket. That of course didn’t work out, and it likely wouldn’t work out today; in the era of email, there’s just not enough mail to justify it. But you know what we’re not going to run out of anytime soon? Crazy people. Any rocketplane-based suborbital payload delivery system that can send a meaningful disaster-recovery payload across the planet can also fire quite a number of high-paying adrenaline junkies out into space. Not in a capsule, mind you, but in little more than space suits. Lob ’em up there in a pop-up stage that looks like any conventional upper stage… rockets and tankage to the rear, cylinder-cone payload shroud at the front, with the passengers sitting inside the shroud as if they were in a bus. As the people-pod exits the atmosphere, blow the “top” off the shroud (or have it split and fold aside) so that the passengers are now sitting in a “convertible,” exposed to space. Then let ’em jump… to continue to ascend, hit apogee and then descend, re-enter and come down on chutes. You *know* that there would be a line around the block for spacediving. This would spur innovations in astronaut maneuver systems, as the spacedivers would want simple and reliable maneuver capability so that they could link up like parachutists do, as well as drive innovations in *cheap* space suits. The upper stage would be recoverable and resuable; probably coming down on chutes. But install bigger chutes, and it could come down loaded with bandaids, meds, generators and perhaps even a doctor or two (presumably wearing space suits and yelling “XTREME!” all the way down.)

Back to the original idea: it’s not new. Not by a long shot. In the late 1950’s the US Army studied using the Redstone rocket as a battlefield cargo delivery system, lobbing weapons and ammo at Our Boys; they even examined launching Our Boys with the Redstone and Jupiter missiles. This led to the Douglas ICARUS concept… a modified Single Stage to Orbit launcher meant to fire 1,200 fully-armed Marines across the planet. More on all these ideas HERE. None of these were ever built.

This Boeing artwork depicts the late-1970’s concept for a receiver station on Earth for the energy transmitted from an orbiting solar power satellite. The SPS would convert sunlight into electricity, and then into a tightly collimated beam of microwaves; this would be captured at ground level by a vast receiver. Since microwaves are fairly easily captured, the receiver would appear as not a whole lot more than a vast elliptical field of chickenwire. Sunlight, wind and rain would pass right through it, thus the underside, as the painting depicts, could be conventional farmland.

Most of the time I’ve seen this painting reproduced it has been black and white; this rendering, scanned from Gatland’s “Space Technology,” is the only one I know of in color. Anyone have the full-rez version?

The ebay listings for the F-23 derivatives, Lockheed Archangels and A-12 Avenger II diagram booklets will end Sunday… 13 hours from this writing. Bid now! Bid often! Bid insanely high! Bid like this is a mafia money laundering operation!

Another space-based anti-missile system contemplated for the Strategic Defense Initiative was the neutral particle beam. Specifics are exceedingly thin as befits a concept that sounds a *lot* like science fiction.

In practice, the system is a particle accelerator that ionizes hydrogen atoms, grabs them with massively powerful magnetic fields and accelerates them to near light speed. At the end o the weapon, extra electrons are stripped from the atoms, making the hydrogen atoms electrically neutral. This makes them largely impervious to natural and artificial magnetic fields, so they go where you aim ’em and can’t be readily shielded against. However, atmosphere rapidly scatters the beam, so space basing is really the only option. Unlike a laser beam, a mirrored surface would not faze a neutral particle beam. In fact, much of the damage would be done *within* the target, as the hydrogen atoms would penetrate some distance before being stopped and depositing their kinetic energy as heat.

Most of the artist impressions of NPB weapons that I recall showed U-shaped accelerators. By folding the accelerator in half, the spacecraft would be more compact. The energy requirements meant that nuclear powerplants were needed, but the power requirements – billions of Watts for a tiny fraction of a second – would make the power storage and supply issue entertaining. If that issue is cleared up, firing rates of perhaps thousands of shots per second would be possible.

Heres a terrible-quality image of unknown origin, but shows the basic idea:

Another illustration, credited to Los Alamos National Lab. Note that what at first glance appears to be solar panels is actually transparent; these are either the result of severe artistic license or depict not solar panels but radiators.

I’ve seen virtually nothing to judge the scale of these systems, but there were multiple references to NPB weapons being very large systems requiring numerous launches and considerable on-orbit assembly. Studies in the early 1990’s indicated that operational NPB weapons would probably not be feasible before 2025.