Brodie Rig for UAVs

 aircraft, art, history, projects  9 Responses »
Jan 292017
 

In 1961 Ryan Aircraft looked at alternate means of ground launching their Firebee UAvs. A number of companies put forward ideas for various catapults. The SDASM Flickr account has illustrations of a number of the concept put forward. One of them was  Brodie Rig, similar to the suspended runway I posted about a few weeks ago. Sadly details on this and the other studies is very limited… basically the date and the illustrations. The Brodie rig has what appears to be a winch a tthe end, indicating that the drone would have been accelerated not only by its jet engine but also the  rig itself, getting it up to flight speed ASAP. Whether it would be able to be recovered with the rig at the end of the mission is difficult to determine, but doing so would require a definite level of precise flying that I’m not sure the Firebee would have been able to attain in 1961.

See somewhat higher rez version of this illustration HERE.

 

 Posted by at 3:05 pm

Fat Atlas

 history, models, projects, rockets, spacecraft  7 Responses »
Jan 262017
 

Just sold on EBay (not to me, sadly) is a kinda rough Topping display model of a little known proposed variant of the Atlas space launcher, the SLV-3X. This design had a widened body, from ten feet to 12 feet, 7 inches. This allowed for more propellant to be carried without lengthening the vehicle, meaning that the existing launch infrastructure could be used. Additionally, the MA-5 sustainer rocket engine would be replaced with a higher thrust H-1D engine. See HERE for stats.

ebay 2017-01-26 fat atlas 1

The SDASM Flickr account has a nice illustration of the SLV-3X/Centaur. See their site for the higher rez image.

 Posted by at 7:41 pm

OK, folks… start digging

 aircraft, awesomeness, blather, books, history, Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, science, spacecraft  2 Responses »
Jan 182017
 

Here’s your new productivity-buster:

From UFOs to its psychic Stargate tests, the CIA just dumped 13 million declassified pages online

They are available at the CIAs online reading room. Forget the rubbish about psychics and aliens… I’m’a be lookin’ up keywords such as “suntan” and “gusto” and “skunk works.” Find anything good, post a link in the comments.

 Posted by at 7:02 pm

Early Orbital Space Station/2707-300 SST

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, drawings, drawings&documents, history, news, Patreon, projects, spacecraft  6 Responses »
Jan 122017
 

The Aerospace Projects Review Patreon rewards for January will include a reasonably massive Douglas report on the Saturn V-launched pre-Skylab “Early Orbital Space Station” and a scan of a reasonably gigantic diagram of the Boeing 2707-300 SST. These will be released before the end of January and will be available to all then-current Patrons. So if these items interest you, and/or if you are interested in helping the effort to find and preserve this sort of aerospace history, be sure to check out the APR Patreon.

EOSS_0053 EOSS_0027 EOSS_0014

And…

65A12841 general Arrangement 2707-300 websize

 Posted by at 9:26 pm

Twin Fuselage 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft

 aircraft, models, projects, rockets, spacecraft  9 Responses »
Dec 312016
 

This display model was sold on EBay some months back:

twin-747-sca-9 twin-747-sca-8 twin-747-sca-7 twin-747-sca-6 twin-747-sca-5 twin-747-sca-4 twin-747-sca-3 twin-747-sca-2 twin-747-sca-1

Without a display stand it’s difficult to determine exactly who made this, but all indications are that it was an “official” model, made by Boeing, Lockheed or NASA. The design was given some small amount of study around 1973, though the available documentation on it is lean.

Lockheed studied the same idea with the C-5 Galaxy. Of course the C-5 would have been easier to modify since it already had shoulder-mounted wings.

 Posted by at 2:55 pm

Nuclear Propulsion In Space (NASA Film)

 art, awesomeness, history, nukes, projects, rockets, science, spacecraft, youtube  8 Responses »
Dec 292016
 

I’d posted this YouTube video a few years ago, but I’ve found that not only was the video yanked, the whole account associated with it was nuked. Hmmmph.

A film about NERVA (Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications), 1968.

Provides a basic description of nuclear rockets, plus some art, animation and diagrams of nuclear propelled space vehicles along with footage of test firings.

 

 

 Posted by at 2:24 am

Curtiss Wright Model 90 Wind Tunnel Model

 aircraft, eBay, history, Hmm..., models, projects  9 Responses »
Dec 272016
 

Recently sold on EBay was a sizable (something like 4′ long) wind tunnel model of the Curtiss Wright Model 90 AAFSS submission. This was a derivative of their X-19… more or less a quad-tilt-rotor. The Model 90 would have been fairly highly armed, designed to fulfill the same role that the winning AAFSS design – the Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne – was designed for: transporting troops and tearing up ground targets. The US has not had an operational vehicle like this; the Soviet “Hind” helicopter is the closest, though substantially slower, analog. EDIT: Senior moment. Not a troop transport, just a blowin’-up-stuff-on-the-ground-real-good vehicle.

The Model 90 wind tunnel model was formerly on display at an aviation museum in Teterboro, New Jersey. No idea where it ended up, but hopefully it found a good home. I made a half-assed effort to crowdfund this one, but I think the lack of a good way to split the spoils among the funders doomed the concept. How *do* you reward funders for a purchase like this? Best idea was to have the thing 3D scanned, and distribute the scan among the funders, but unlike a scan of a drawing or a document, that’s not going to be readily useful for most people.

What I’d hoped to do was to disassemble the model, male fiberglass molds of the components, reassemble and restore it to like-new-ish condition then send it on to an appropriate and willing museum, possibly Ft. Rucker (since they’re all about Army aviation and have themselves an AH-56). Then make a few fiberglass copies from the molds, converting the “wind tunnel models” into detailed display models. Alas.

curtis-wright-model-90-ebay-g curtis-wright-model-90-ebay-f curtis-wright-model-90-ebay-e curtis-wright-model-90-ebay-d curtis-wright-model-90-ebay-c curtis-wright-model-90-ebay-b curtis-wright-model-90-ebay-a

 Posted by at 10:37 pm

You had *one* job, History Channel…

 AARRRGH, aircraft, blather, drawings, dumbassery, Gah., history, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  17 Responses »
Dec 232016
 

And that job is “history.” You know, to actually know what happened or, failing that, to make some minimal effort to look it up. Seems simple enough…

So there I was, minding my own business, watching the latest thrill-packed episode of “Hunting Hitler.” For those who have somehow missed out, this is the latest iteration of the “Ghost Hunter” and “Bigfoot Hunter” phenomenon… overpaid idjits use hyperbole and fairy tales to go run around in the woods and poke around in some abandoned properties looking for mythical entities. in this case, Our Heroes are stomping around Argentina attempting to prove that Hitler survived WWII and wound up there. The most recent episode was focused on the bullcrap notion that the Nazis actually got an atomic bomb up and running and set it off in Thuringia during the war, and then attempted to set up another A-bomb program post-war in Argentina to further the aims of the Fourth Reich.

Yeah, I know. “I’m not saying it’s Nazis… but it’s Nazis.”

Shows like this are really only good for two things: background noise while you’re working on something, and hate-watching. Now, I don;t know a whole lot about Argentina, so I don’t throw things at the TV when they undoubtedly make howleriffic errors about that country and it’s history. But there are a few things I *do* have some knowledge of. Some things I recognize right off the bat. And they trotted one of these things out and repeated a decades-old lie about it.

Early in the episode, someone who I guess is supposed to be one of their researchers pulls out a page from a German document, a piece of evidence meant to show that the Nazis were planning on nuking Manhattan. This page right here:

sangermap3 sangermap2 sangermap1

I bet there are more than a few reading along who saw that and went, “Hey, I recognize that.” And of course y’all should… I’ve brought it up before. It’s from Eugen Sanger’s 1944 report on his global-range rocket bomber. And, yes, it shows the bombardment of New York City. But *not* with atomic weapons. It’s simply a bell curve… a statistical representation of the distribution of bomb damage if a *lot* of bombs were dropped on a target and the bombs had the usual sort of circular error probability. There’s not a single damn word in Sangers report about nuking New York, very likely because Sanger probably didn’t know a single thing about atom bombs. If there was one thing the Nazi system was good at, it was compartmentalizing programs. If there was another thing the Nazis were good at, it was screwing up atomic physics, what with their hatred of Jews and their reliance upon Werner Heisenberg who either wholly misunderstood what is needed to make an A-bomb or who spent his time on the German A-bomb program busy designing faulty exhaust ports in it.

Way back in 2009 I posted about this map and how it has been misrepresented by charlatans and lazy authors for years. The abuse continues, it seems.

 

 Posted by at 2:48 am

Unducted Fan Airliner Concept

 aircraft, art, projects  6 Responses »
Dec 212016
 

A recently sold item on EBay was this piece of artwork depicting a Boeing concept for an airliner powered by two propfans. These engines, popular items of study in the late 70s and into the 80s, were somewhere between turbofans and turboprops, with contra-rotating unducted fans using blades of complex design and contours. The advantage was, of course, fuel efficiency; the shape of the blades meant that they could spin with tip speeds closer to the speed of sound compared to turboprop blades, and could push the plane faster than normally practical for a turboprop.

Given the NASA logo on the tail, this piece of art undoubtedly depicts a proposal for an unducted fan test vehicle. The gray areas on the wing upper surfaces may indicate laminar flow control via suction, as with the Northrop X-21; this would all conspire to make this a very fuel efficient, if also very complex, jetliner.

boeing-turboprop-pusher-airliner-art

 Posted by at 7:18 pm
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