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If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.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. 
Almost four years ago I posted about a project known as “Flashback,” a vaguely-described mid 1960’s program to carry and drop a giant *something* from a B-52. What it was, exactly, was not described with any clarity, but there were enough clues that I tentatively speculated that it was a design for an American “Tsar Bomb” with a yield of fifty or more megatons. To my knowledge I was the first person to yap about it publicly. I sent what I’d found to a few atomic and aerospace researchers to see if they knew anything. At the time, they were as mystified as I was.
Today there’s less mystery. I was contacted by one of the researchers I had contacted back then, letting me know he’s writing an article to appear in a month or so in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, covering Flashback among other things. He has Found Some Stuff. In short… Flashback was a design for a 50 to 100 megaton hydrogen bomb.
Giggitty.
I recently came across something on ebay that looked interesting; the buy-it-now price is a bit steep, so I googled it. Huzzah! It’s available online as a PDF. D’oh: my antivirus program freaked out that the connection to the university website is insecure. Huzzah! It has been archived on the Wayback machine.
This is a writeup, with photos and diagrams, of the July 11, 1962 news conference at NASA headquarters where the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous technique was described. prior to the the understanding was that the Apollo Command and Service Modules would land directly on the lunar surface; this sounds easy, but required a bigger booster than the Saturn V and would have put the astronauts far above the lunar surface (so far as I know, no determination of how exactly the astronauts were going to get some fifty or more feet down, and then fifty or more feet back up). LOR entailed the use of the Lunar Excursion Module,a small, lightweight spacecraft that could zip on down the the surface from lunar orbit and then hop on back up. Far less mass needed to go to the lunar surface, meaning the planned Saturn C-5 (later Saturn V) could take care of the whole mission in one shot. No need to assemble spacecraft in Earth orbit using multiple launches of hardware and propellant tankers.
Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light! Alternatively, you can support through the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Just a few months ago in February or so, I mentioned that I was working on a model of the “IXS Enterprise” warp drive ship for Fantastic Plastic. Currently planned for 1/288 scale, this is the most data-intensive model I’ve done so far… as shown below with only one of the two rings in place, the model is well over half a gigabyte, and my computer just laughs at me when I tell it to render the thing. The model nears completion; some “kitification” is needed on some parts and the two shuttles don’t exist yet.
In related matters, FP has released the model of the “Super Nexus” I CADded up a few years ago:
And the Convair “landing boat:”
And the Soviet LOK spacecraft:
That last one is of course in scale with the Soviet LK lunar lander I did for FP a while back:
Christmas is coming.
Here are some screenshots snagged from a not-quite-final version of the book, showing the sort of content you can expect from the final product.
As before it is available for pre-order from both the publisher and from Amazon:
