Amazon currently has my “SR-71” bookazine for thirteen bucks, plus shipping. Woo. Get a few copies now, before Christmas comes and you fall short and you have to live in eternal shame that you did not have enough copies to gift to all your friends, family, co-workers, arch-enemies and random people on the street.
I say “that looks like a mockup.”
To me it looks like thin sheet metal riveted to some sort of structure. The vertical tail in particular looks… ummm…
The first test pieces of the SpaceX Starship also looked like cheaply constructed crap, so… maybe? But color me skeptical that this is an actual aircraft. That landing gear… yeesh.
I stumbled across some paperwork that for no readily apparent reason I’ve kept for a quarter century. Shown below are two correspondence that might be of some amusement. They deal with my very first “real” job after graduation, when I was hired to work on a The Next Big Thing project for Orbital Sciences Corporation.
First up (some personal data redacted):
Neato! I’m hired! So I packed up my stuff (including my baby archive, which fit in two boxes), drove from Illinois to Virginia right smack in the middle of the Blizzard Of The Century, spent a bucket of cash for an apartment, and started an exciting new adventure, sure to be filled with excitement, career fulfillment and fair and reasonable treatment from my employers. What could possibly go wrong?
Gee, that was fun.
It was a short, sharp shock that gave me a good solid look at the aerospace industry in the US. Unfeeling corporations, sociopathic bosses, incredibly blinkered, short-sighted management *and* self-serving unions, all beholden to quite possibly the *dumbest* politicians in human history.
I shoulda gone into art. I have no real talent for it… but then, I’ve seen “Star Trek: Discovery” and it’s clear that talent and skill are no longer important or even desirable in modern artistic endeavors.
I have not yet heard how much it will cost me to buy copies of my new book for signing. But for estimating purposes I think I’ll probably have to charge something like $50 each plus media mail postage. I don’t want to guess what it’d cost to ship them internationally. Yikes. But as I did with the SR-71 book, signed copies would likely have signed 18×24 prints as a bonus… in this case, probably 3 or 4. Subjects as yet undetermined. I’m far from taking orders, but I’m interested in getting a read on the level of interest. If spending $50 or more on a signed copy sounds like something you’d want to do, send me an email: 
So today I signed the contract for my third book. This one will be a little different than the previous two: rather than covering one or two specific aircraft types and their evolution, competitors and derivatives, this one will cover a *category* of aircraft. Details later.
By hiding the shuttles and simplifying a number of the components, my system was just able to render the complete vehicle. Huzzah!
The modelling is nearly complete. Unfortunately, the fully assembled version of the CAD model is so complex that none of my computers would even attempt to render or shade it; all I seem to be able to get are wireframe images. That’s what I get for being poor, I suppose. The shuttles are themselves each as complex as many of the CAD models I’ve made.
The rewards for October, 2021, have been sent out. Patrons should have received a notification message through Patreon linking to the rewards; subscribers should have received a notification from Dropbox linking to the rewards. If you did not, let me know.
Document: “C-131C Tactical Unit Support Airplane,” 1953 Consolidated Vultee briefing on cargo aircraft military capabilities
Document: “Aerodynamic Model test Report Titan IIIM Final Posttest Report 0.0535 scale Force and Pressure Model Phase II,” 1967 Martin Report Of Unusual Size (ROUS, 353 pages) describing with charts, data, model photos and diagrams, of the proposed Titan IIIM topped with a Manned Orbiting Laboratory.
Diagram: General Arrangement of the Douglas D-558 research aircraft (provenance unknown)
CAD Diagram (for $5-level and up): Medusa Spinnaker, second illustration of giant but lightweight nuclear pulse propelled spacecraft
If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. *ALL* back issues, one a month since 2014, are available for subscribers at low cost.
As previously mentioned, the story of Flashback is starting to come out. This article by Alex Wellerstein in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is mostly about the Soviet Tsar bomb, but also describes American responses with giant nukes of our own including the BTV and the Flashback.
If you are a $10 and up Patron or subscriber, you should by now have received a link to this months catalogs for voting. If you haven’t, let me know.
