Apr 022016
Apr 012016
This image was passed along to me; it came from an ebay auction from some time in the past. No further info than this illustration, but it is clearly a Boeing “control configured vehicle” bomber concept.
I know it’s a Boeing design because a year and a half ago I lost out on an ebay auction for another piece of concept art showing the same aircraft, this time with “Boeing” clearly visible on the engine nacelle:
And I know it’s a Controlled Configured Vehicle because in the early 1970’s, Boeing studied a bomber that was very similar in configuration to this, known as the “CCV-100-2.” There are some obvious differences, such as the cockpit canopies and the engine inlets, but the overall configurations are very similar. The CCV-100-2 received a tiny bit of press in Aviation Week, and was granted a design patent for the overall shape. Sadly, I do not have anything on performance or dimensions; if anyone *does* know more about this, please let me know.
Mar 292016
… the man knew how to decorate an office.
Early 60’s:
Later 60’s:
Does anyone know of a good, clear color version of just the painting from the first photo? That’s the lunar lander from the “Project Horizon” days, when the Saturn was an Army project.
Mar 292016
Some photos (from ebay) of a NASA PR glossy from December, 1961, showing the then-current Saturn C-5 configuration. Note the fairly obvious signs of some retouching of the engines on the first stage… either the engines were originally larger, or they were larger in number. Note the lack of the small but distinctive stabilizing fins on the first stage.
Mar 242016
A mid-1960’s German (VFW/Heinkel) concept for a VTOL passenger transport, a quad-tilt-wing design, with capacity for 40 passengers or 13,200 lbs of cargo.
I’ve uploaded a two-page article from the era on the VC400. It is in the 2016-03 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to all $4+ APR Patreon patrons. If interested, check out the APR Patreon.
Mar 232016
Now up for $10-level patrons to look through and vote on. If interested in getting aerospace goodies (this month there will be *three* documents, one sizable diagram and one original CAD diagram) for as little as a buck and a half, check out the APR Patreon.
Mar 222016
The Third Reich was jam-packed full of ridiculous notions. Genocide. Invading Russia. Declaring war on the US. Superstitious claptrap. Dreams of world domination. Government programs that favor one ethnic group over another. Collective economics. But perhaps the *goofiest* idea was one of Hitler’s favorites: the P1000 “Ratte,” a 1000-ton *tank* packing the turret from a battleship, with two 280mm cannon and diesel engines from U-boats. There is zero chance that it would have worked worth a damn,and had one popped up on a battlefield every tactical bomber in a 500 mile radius would have competed to bob it into oblivion.
I’ve often thought that what the world needed was a good scale model of the Ratte, but I’ve never gotten around to it. But it seems someone else has; TAKom Models has recently released a 1/144 kit of the P1000. It includes two “Maus” tanks for scale. I would have preferred 1/72 scale, but I imagine that would have been a bit spendy.
The box art is fairly epic. Not only does it showcase the ridiculous scale of the Ratte… it also includes Nazi flying saucers because, hey, why not.
The Ratte kit is available on Amazon.
Mar 092016
Still slowly slogging through the process of cleaning up the Sanger “A Rocket Drive for Long Range Bombers” report scans. Some pages are easy… a few minutes and done. Other pages, specifically the ones from the middle of the book, can take well in excess of an hour. The problem is that the Sanger report is hard-bound, and the feller who scanned it didn’t want to break the spine. As a consequence, near the middle of the book, the inboard bits of text are smooshed and blurred. The only way to digitally restore these is to copy/paste bits of text and individual letters to replace the bad bits. *These* pages can take a lot longer.
Fortunately the whole book isn’t like this. Near the front and back, the scans are quite good and easy to deal with. This includes the last two pages… pages that list where copies of the report were to be sent. there are some *very* interesting names in this list…
Mar 072016
Project Horizon was a late 1950’s US Army study for a military lunar base. It’s hardly a secret at this point… it has been written about for decades, and several volumes of the report have been available online as generally “meh”-quality PDFs for years. Still, as well known as Horizon is to the space-history community, I imagine it’s pretty much unknown to the general population. So imagine my modest surprise when I halfway caught a commercial for a special on Project Horizon to air tomorrow (Tuesday) night on the Science Channel, on an episode of “NASA’s Unexplained Files.”
From the bit I caught, it seems like the show will probably slant the story not as “hey, look as this neato-wacky concept the Army looked at sixty years ago,” but more as “what is the Army hiding on the moon, look, BEHOLD, for we have found Secret Plans.” In general this would be a turnoff, but it’s not like Horizon gets a lot of press. And from the brief glimpse, it *looks* like someone got hold of Project Horizon color artwork. So this might be one of those things where the show is spectacular if you simply put the sound on “mute.” Consequently, it might be worth digitally recording if anyone has the ability. And who knows… *maybe* they’ll actually produce something new, or give hints as to where a complete original *color* version of the reports might be found.
UPDATE: Bleurrrrgh. Good and shallow, added nothing new. The color artwork shown is *modern* lunar base artwork, from the 90’s or later.
Mar 052016
I managed to finagle a complete full-color scan of an original copy of Eugen Sanger’s 1944 report, Uber einen Raketenantrieb fur Fernbomber (A Rocket Drive for Long Range Bombers). A “meh” quality B&W PDF of an English-language translation of the report has been available online for a while, but it seems to me that the world needs a proper high-rez version of the original, in color where appropriate.
One of the pages I’ve cleaned up from the new scan shows the statistical damage potential if New York City was regularly targeted by a very large number of bombs. This image, at least a black-and-white English-translated version, several generations removed from the original, is reasonably well-known and commonly reproduced… and as described a few years back, is generally described wrong.
