This set of illustrations took distressingly long to come together, a lot of that time being research. Issue 4 of US Spacecraft Projects will, as previously promised, be all about “landers,” an admittedly somewhat vague descriptor. Still a fair bit of work to do, but at least the basics are all in place.
I recently decided that I wanted to at least look at the idea of producing a printed and bound book or two of aerospace artwork. For copyright reasons selling coffeetable tomes filled with other peoples art is probably not a good idea, so this would likely be something just for myself, if it can be made affordable. But step one was gathering the artwork I have into one location so’s I can figure out what to include. So I dug through the ol’ hard drives and gathered stuff into one folder. A few conditions: the images had to be large/high-rez enough to be printed at at least 8.5X11; they had to be in color, not B&W; they had to be paintings (not CGI, not photos of models, not line drawings); they had to be “official” images, not fan art of the like; they had to be interesting.
I’ve been thinking of perhaps a few different volumes… “Saturn/Apollo,” “Shuttle Program,” “Conceptual Designs,” etc. I was looking for something on the order of 50 images per volume.
End result: the “Aero Art” folder has 982 files for a total of 7.73 gigabytes. I guess I have enough to take a stab at this…
What I’d *really* like to do is to have a larger format book… preferably 11X17 or so pages. But that’s probably a bit much.
propellant tank, structure, landing gear and a nuclear rocket engine, to be used for landing a payload on Mars and for flying or hopping around. The propellant would be liquid carbon dioxide, easily compressed from the Martian atmosphere; the performance would be, by conventional liquid hydrogen nuclear rocket standards, reasonably awful, but it would be adequate to lurch back into Mars orbit or to do long range hops.
Two main designs seem to have been studied: a conical “ballistic” vehicle that would be a dedicated “hopper,” landing on its tail, and a winded vehicle that would land vertically in a horizontal attitude. This latter design was sent to me in the form of diagrams and five computer renders. The renders – early 1990’s vintage – came as viewgraph transparencies, clearly photographs of a computer monitor. The winged vehicle had simple shock absorbers for landing gear, terminating in dishes rather than wheels meaning that a rolling start or stop was impossible. The available information sadly doesn’t explain how the thing was supposed to land vertically.
The full-rez scans of the viewgraphs have been made available to APR Patrons in the 2016-01 APR Extras Dropbox folder. If you’d like to help out and gain access to this and many other pieces of aerospace history, please check out the APR Patreon.
The next issue of US Space Projects will, like the previous issue, include diagrams created via 3D modelling. This time it’ll be for the North American Aviation Mars Excursion Module.
It dawns on me that today is a holiday of some note. It also dawns on me that I have bills to pay. So, until midnight-ish (mountain time), I’m running a sale on all US Aerospace Projects and Aerospace Projects Review downloadable issues. Still can’t run a convenient Paypal “coupon” or any such thing, so as with previous sales, you buy something and I’ll refund you the difference.
So, for the duration of the sale, get 20% off all APR and USXP orders of $10 or more. And get 25% off for all orders over $100.
Sale has ended.
A 1965 General Dynamics/Convair concept for using obsolete Minuteman I ICBMs as upper stages atop the Little Joe II. This setup would put 2,000 pounds of payload into a 100 nautical mile orbit.
Coming soonish…
OK, so I wrote about the “Have Sting” orbital railgun, and produced some provisional diagrams of it, publishing them in US Space Projects #3. A blog article was written for War Is Boring discussing “Have Sting,” based in no small part on my diagrams. OK, so far so good. But then other blogs start writing about Have Sting, and an error is introduced.
Whenever a blog post links to my blog, a “pingback notification” is sent to my blog dashboard. I’ve just glanced at these, haven’t given them much thought. For the most part they seem to be just parroting the verbiage from the War is Boring piece. But with one change: “Have Sting” has become “Have Sling.” A “T” became an “L.”
Examples:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/219718-exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built
In September, the Aerospace Project Reviews Blog published some fascinating diagrams depicting “Have Sling,” which aerospace historian Scott Lowther described as “[a] General Electric design for a gigantic orbital railgun.” Have Sling was never built, of course.
http://www.usaspeaks.com/news/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
September, the Aerospace Project Reviews Blog published some fascinating diagrams depicting “Have Sling,” which aerospace historian Scott Lowther described as “[a] General …
http://www.usaspeaks.com/news/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
http://www.viralnewstrend.com/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
And a bunch more, all seemingly the same post over and over.
And if you Google “have sling” and some other terms, some seriously wacky stuff appears, which I’m guessing is the result of some weird auto-translation:
http://www.bbtechnonews.com/index.php/2015/12/19/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
In September, the Aerospace Task Reviews Blog site released some remarkable layouts portraying “Have Sling,” which aerospace chronicler Scott Lowther
“Aerospace Task Reviews?”
And:
http://journalfocus.com/2015/12/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
Exploring the ‘Fatality Celebrity’ space gun America never built
UNITED STATE protection coordinators did at one time think about constructing a huge Fatality Star-like gun in space as component of the “Celebrity Wars” rocket protection program, as Warisboring’s Steve Weintz advised us this week in the middle of the hullaballoo of the position of The Pressure Awakens.
In September, the Aerospace Job Reviews Blog site released some interesting representations portraying “Have Sling,” which aerospace chronicler Scott Lowther…
… the styles explain a space tool the dimension of the International Space Terminal, each Lowther.
Buh?
So now when people try to research orbital railguns, there’s every chance that they will be presented with the fallacious designation “Have Sling.”
I just did a Google search on “railgun” and “Have Sling.” It spat back 741 results. “Railgun” and “Have Sting” only produced 321 results. The lie traveled around the world while the truth was still putting on its boots. And entertainingly, in doing some Googling for this post, I found this blog post. It is illustrated in part by “Do NOT try this at home: schematics for the orbital railgun . (Image courtesy up-ship.com.)” I found this illustration amusing for two reasons… firstly, when you say “Image courtesy whoever,” generally you’ve asked whoever for permission to republish. I usually don’t mind people reposting the images I create, but I wasn’t asked here, just sayin.’ More entertainingly, the diagrams of the “orbital railgun” are in fact my diagrams for the 10-meter USAF Orion. Which ain’t a railgun.
It has been a while since I’ve put out a Pax Orionis story, but a new one has just been made available to the Pax Orionis Patreon patrons. This one tells of the maiden voyage of the Columbia and the resulting changes in geopolitics…
The bonus version (available to $2 & up patrons) includes diagrams and data on the Nova-class lofter as well as a bonus news article. If interested, check out the Pax Orionis Patreon. It’s cheap!
For those unaware: Pax Orionis is an alternate history project. In short, the Cuban Missile Crisis goes a little “funny,” resulting in the US fielding nuclear pulse propelled spacecraft (Orions). The goal is hard SF covering a number of decades of events, good, bad and really quite awful.
A photo (dating from the 1950’s sometime) showing Dr. Abe Silverstein and Edward R. Sharp, Director of the NACA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, looking at a model of a ramjet equipped supersonic fighter concept. Unclear if this is a NACA design, but it does resemble something out of Lockheed.
Link to the full-rez HERE.
