May 152015
 

I’ve made a number of science fictional CAD models for Fantastic Plastic. Wonderfest, an annual hobby convention in Louisville, Kentucky, is coming up at the end of the month, and Fantastic Plastic is going to set up there. A while back I thought it might be interesting to take some of the CAD models I’ve created for current and forthcoming Fantastic Plastic model kits, specifically the Helicarrier, the Prometheus and the Messiah, and create 2D layout drawings… and then make cyanotype blueprints. Further, the blueprints would be at the same scale as the kits.

The end results? A moderately sized Helicarrier blueprint, two big Prometheus sheets (one showing the craft in flight, the other showing it in landed configuration), and one enormous Messiah blueprint, a full six feet long.

I don’t know if there is a market for such things. The Prometheus and the Messiah in particular are just gigantic. Were I to really try to commercialize them, I’d probably scale them down to at least 2/3 and more likely 1/2 the current size. Still, creating them was not a minor effort… so what the heck. I’m going to make them available for a limited time. Yes, they’re pricey. But they’re also *huge.* And a pain to make. And there won’t be very many of them on the entire planet (right now, two copies each of the Helicarrier and the Messiah; a grand total of one of the Prometheus prints).

These will be available for a two-week period, starting now. If some dark miracle occurs and I sell a hundred of them within that span, then, great! But however many, at the end of the two weeks, that’s it. All done, no more. I will total them up, and hand notate  each one as numbered limited edition (“1 of 5,” or whatever, based on the order that orders come in) plus I’ll initial each one. Because why not.

Feel free to order as many of each as you want. Don’t forget postage… and don’t forget that with this one-time postage you can order as many *other* cyanotype prints as you like.

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Prometheus prints:

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Helicarrier:

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 Posted by at 10:49 pm
May 152015
 

Saw this on eBay:

German WWII electro-mechanical analog computer for the V2 rocket – A4 missile

The starting bid price is a bit rich for my blood…  $7500. But if the photos and the scan from the Christies catalog are accurate, it does seem to be vintage V-2 hardware. Not quite sure what it did or where it did it; since there are dials that a human was apparently meant to set, it would seem to be part of the aiming system (which was little more than “go that far then flop out of the sky,” with azimuth controlled by rotating the launch pad and, IIRC, some radio guidance to get it pointed in the right direction. It *might* have gone on the missile itself, or it *might* have been part of the launch infrastructure. Shrug. This unit seems to be missing some bits, such as the rather important dials.

A bunch of photos at the auction site.

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 Posted by at 6:53 pm
May 142015
 

A brief article on a Japanese mini-shuttle, photographed from an issue of “Space World” magazine a few months back (sadly, I didn’t catch the date of the article, but it would have been sometime in the early/mid 1980’s). This is, I believe, an early design of the “HOPE” spaceplane which was more or less Japans answer to the French Hermes spaceplane. This mini-shuttle would have been a little bigger than the Dyna Soar from twenty years earlier, but equipped not only with its own onboard rocket propulsion system but also a pair of turbojets of atmospheric propulsion.

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 Posted by at 10:22 am
May 102015
 

If you’ve got a hankering to find out what the super-secret Lacrosse radar satellites look like, the Russians got you covered. A Russian satellite tracking facility in Siberia used telescopes to take photos of several of these satellites, and then, rather unconventionally, released the images. The images were collected and analyzed, and posted in a PDF album:

An Album of Images of LACROSSE Radar Reconnaissance Satellites
Made by a 60 cm Adaptive Optics System
at the
G.S. Titov Altai Optical-Laser Center

The images are not spectacular… nobody will be making details models based off them. But you can get a sense of the overall configurations(s), as well as the size of the antennae; from that, an analyst could give you a good idea what the capabilities of the sensor systems are.

Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon.

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 Posted by at 1:25 am
May 072015
 

I’ve uploaded the fourth of four parts of the ISS Mass Properties Databook which provides a pretty complete overview of the ISS and all its major components, including layout diagrams of all the modules and whatnot. This is available for all APR Patreon patrons at $4/month level and above.

Check HERE to sign up. Many, many other aerospace goodies also available.

 Posted by at 10:26 pm
May 062015
 

Looks like it was a successful test. It also looks like one *hell* of a ride. The test occurs about 16 minutes into the video:

The finned cylinder aft of the capsule turns out to not only be a very effective aerodynamic stabilizer, it turns out to be *vital.* As soon as the capsule separates from the stabilizer… wow. I’m sure there are adrenaline junkies who’d pay good money for this ride.

 Posted by at 7:15 am
May 052015
 

A blog reader passed along this view of a piece of early LEM art, hoping to see a higher resolution version. Can anyone help?

LEM

Bonus points if you recognize where the blog reader saw this…

 Posted by at 11:15 pm
May 012015
 

I’m still skeptical, but testing is testing:

New Test Suggests NASA’s “Impossible” EM Drive Will Work In Space

The electromagnetic drive works – if it works – by rattling microwaves around inside a metal can. Through the magic of… well, magic, I guess, the vanishingly tiny thrust developed by the microwaves as a pure photon rocket gets magnified into a measurable but still tiny level of thrust. How does this happen?

[T]he EM Drive’s thrust was due to the Quantum Vacuum (the quantum state with the lowest possible energy) behaving like propellant ions behave in a MagnetoHydroDynamics drive (a method electrifying propellant and then directing it with magnetic fields to push a spacecraft in the opposite direction) for spacecraft propulsion.

Whenever anyone starts yammering about quantum this or that or harnessing the vacuum, I have flashbacks to Deepak Chopra and start tuning them out. Still, NASA Eagleworks at Johnson Space Center is not known for a whole lot of crackpottery, so *maybe* they’ve stumbled across something. Or maybe they’re working on the newest Dean Drive.

Electromagnetics ain’t my schtick, so all I can say is that whenever anyone else has thought that they were getting a free lunch out of the universe, they found out that such a thing don’t happen. Superluminal neutrinos, anyone?

 Posted by at 10:22 pm