Aircraft Design: Drunk Edition

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, blather, Crazy, Hmm..., projects, wisdom  5 Responses »
Sep 082015
 

Huh.

Meet ‘Mark’, the crazy genius who designed an aeroplane while drunk

Mark, a mechanical engineering student at Michigan Tech, got blitzed, designed an airplane, then woke up with no recollection of it.

Granted, it’s of course not a complete design, but instead sketches and a bunch of math. But damn, those sketches are a lot better than some I’ve seen come out of *sober* *professional* aircraft designers. The aircraft is a wing-in-ground effect plane, designed to skim just above the surface of the water; the air compressed between the wing and the waters surface creates more lift than if the aircraft was slightly higher, flying out of ground effect. WIG craft are dandy ways of gaining fuel efficiency for relatively slow transport planes, so long as you’re cool with a bumpy ride. Which, if you’re wasted, you probably are.

The story sounds like a fun adventure in Asperger’s Syndrome;  “Mark” plunged into design work with a passion and yammered at his roommates, going through all the math in detail while they laughed. That sort of commitment to cause in the face of derision is a common feature of Aspergers. But the blackout drunk aspect of the story makes it a bit different from usual.

ekranoplan

The real question now is: is Mark a better designer sober… or drunk? There is of course precedent.

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 Posted by at 2:48 pm

S-N Art

 art, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft  1 Response »
Sep 082015
 

The image quality is admittedly terrible (being a scan of a print of a microfilm), but this might be of interest… a piece of NASA art circa 1963 depicting the Saturn V with an S-N third stage rather than an S-IVb third stage. The S-N was not a fixed design, but varied over the years; here, it was a fairly stubby stage ten meters in diameter, same as the S-IC and S-II stage. The S-N would vary in diameter and length from design to design, but one common element was the use of a single NERVA solid-core nuclear thermal rocket engine. As shown here, the distance from the nuclear rocket to the Apollo capsule up front just isn’t terribly far; consequently, this depicted a design with extraordinary levels of shielding, or depicted an unmanned Apollo (but then, why the abort tower), or it was just artistic license.

S-N

 Posted by at 10:13 am

10-Meter USAF Orion

 art, books, cyanotype blueprints, drawings, history, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, projects, spacecraft  8 Responses »
Sep 032015
 

I continue to tinker with the CAD diagrams for “Nuclear Pulse Propulsion,” as well as creating new ones. I decided to see what the diagrams for the 10-Meter design for the USAF would look like in a larger format… in this case, two sheets 40 inches by 10, at 1/96 scale. A fair bit of formatting needed as yet, but on the whole I think they look pretty good.

Anyone interested? I’m thinking a combination of prints (folded into a book or rolled) and cyanotype blueprints on vellum. If this idea is popular (I’m going to take at least this design to print, just for myself), I’d do something similar for the 10-meter NASA vehicle, the 20-meter NASA vehicle and the 86-foot 4,000 “battleship.”

NPP-0500X-Model

 Posted by at 9:59 pm

Construction Base in Space

 art, awesomeness, blather, history, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft  3 Responses »
Aug 312015
 

Boeing art from the late 1970s depicting the construction of a base in low Earth orbit, which in turn would be used to construct components of solar power satellites, which would then be slowly boosted to geosynchronous using electric propulsion. Even though the base would be dwarfed by the SPS itself, the base was monumental in scale compared to any other manned space facility proposed before or since.

SPS construction

The artwork (scanned from a brochure that was folded down the middle, thus there’s a half-repaired fold line) depicts not only a Space Shuttle orbiter, but also the second stage of a ballistically recoverable Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle.

I have posted the full-rez version at the APR Patreon Extras Dropbox folder for 2015-08 (while it’s 2015-09 now, the file began the process of uploading at 11:59 PM by my watch, so…). If interested, please check out the APR Patreon and consider joining. Lots of benefits!

patreon-200

 Posted by at 11:19 pm

Star Raker Art

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, history, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft  57 Responses »
Aug 202015
 

In the late 1970’s Rockwell international studied the “Star-Raker,” a large airbreathing horizontal takeoff and landing SSTO designed to support the Solar Power Satellite program. This 2,268,000 kg gross weight vehicle would have a payload of 89,200 kg; the claim was that this vehicle could fly roughly daily and very cheaply. Of course, at about the same time Rockwell was claiming that the Space Shuttle would have a two-week turnaround and would be the cheapest ticket to space…

While Star-Raker was far from the biggest or most powerful launcher studied for SPS, it was certainly one of the more interesting concepts. While a number of SPS reports have described the Star-Raker, to my knowledge a dedicated Star-Raker design report has not come to light. If anybody knows of such a thing, by all means let me know.

Star-Raker garnered a bit of press back in the day, likely due in part to the fact that Rockwell released a number of pieces of concept art, like the one below showing the vehicle in orbit.

2015-08-200353

I have uploaded the full-rez version of this to the APR Patreon “Extras” folder for 2015-08 on Dropbox. It is available for all $4 and up APR Patrons.

 Posted by at 6:14 pm

Goodyear GA-28A/B Convoy Fighter

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, books, history, new products, projects  8 Responses »
Aug 162015
 

This looks like an interesting book:Goodyear GA-28A/B Convoy Fighter: The Naval VTOL Turboprop Tailsitter Project of 1950 by Jared Zichek.

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It’s available in both paperback and epub from Amazon.

 

The same author also produced the excellent Secret Aerospace Projects of the U.S. Navy: The Incredible Attack Aircraft of the USS United States, 1948-1949

 Posted by at 1:59 pm

Early Shuttle Launch Artwork: 2

 art, history, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 142015
 

A Rockwell illustration showing an almost-but-not-quite-final Space Shuttle design. The only obvious major difference between this design and actual Shuttle is the rounded dome on the nose of the ET. This *may* have been a cover over a de-orbit solid rocket motor, but if so it was a small one. Other changes include differences in the booster sep motors; this painting shows four nose BSMs in a straight vertical line and four tail BSMs in a straight vertical line. As built, the forward BSMs were in a 2X2 square array, while the at BSMs were arrayed around the nozzle. Some minor difference in thermal tile pattern on the forward fuselage of the Orbiter.

The full-rez version has been made available for $10-level patrons at the APR Patreon.

Old Shuttle Art - SRB Sep

 Posted by at 6:16 pm

PDF Review: History of MOL

 history, Patreon, projects, spacecraft  2 Responses »
Aug 142015
 

Just released today… an official “History of the Manned Orbital Laboratory” by Carl Berger of the MOL Program Office, 1970. This originally Top Secret history still has a number of blacked-out text redactions and, sadly, no illustrations in its 356 pages. I’ve only skimmed through it, but it looks to be an interesting read.

Direct link to the “History of MOL” PDF file

The table of contents:

MOL contents

 

 Posted by at 3:52 pm
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