This one is admittedly a bit different, but might be of some interest and/or use.
No, it’s not actually an official USAF manual. But its author(s) seems to know his subject.
I happened to notice that the last diagram in US Bomber Projects #13, showing that issues various designs all together at the same scale, was not the actual finalized diagram. So I’ve corrected it. At the same time, I added an equivalent diagram to US Launch Vehicles Projects #01, showing all the boosters to the same scale. If you have previously purchased one or both of these, the info in the email your received with the download instructions will still work if you’d like to download the revised versions.
And if you haven’t purchased these… well, here’s another chance!
After stumbling across a 1974 issue of Analog magazine that I’d forgotten that I’d been lucky enough to have inscribed by Larry Niven (as regaled HERE), it dawned on me that I actually have a number of books that the authors have enscribbled for me. So I went digging. I’m *sure* I have more than these, but this is what I found:
As it turns out I *do* have a first edition of Footfall signed by both Niven & Pournelle. Neato!
NASA SP-413, “Space Settlements, A Design Study,” was published in 1977 and brought together the results of a 1975 NASA-Ames Research Center effort to do a preliminary study of a giant torus space station for several thousand permanent inhabitants. It is a basic text on the subject of space colonies, but obtaining a copy of the printed book of course requires money (but not much… a quick check at abebooks.com shows them going for about $8) and online versions have typically been either black-and-white scan PDFs of indifferent quality, or versions rendered into painful HTML format. Fortunately, someone (it’s unclear to me who, though it seems a professional job) has scanned in the book and all the illustrations and reformatted the text into an all-new, clean PDF version.
The PDF can be downloaded HERE.
Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon.
Two new publications in the US Aerospace Projects series are now available.
Now available: US Bomber Projects #13. This issue includes:
USBP #13 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
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Also available: US Launch Vehicle Projects #01. The premiere issue of this new series includes:
USLP #01 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
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What’s dumber than a western political leader calling for government funded homeopathy and astrology? How about a pack of Surt worshippers trashing their own cultural heritage? Gentlemen… behold:
And on top of trashing a museum full of artifacts, the Islamic State representatives did this:
Remember, kids: you’re a racist if you think some cultures suck.
A friend of mine is looking for a story she remembers reading in something like second grade… would have been in the late 1970’s. As she remembers it, there was a steel mill or ironworks or foundry or some such. In it worked a man made out of iron or iron ore. He *may* have been named “Bill,” but that’s uncertain. One day the place encountered some sort of trouble… ran out of iron at just the worst possible moment. If they didn’t get their work done, Very Bad Things would result. So, “Bill” apparently sacrificed himself to save the factory by tossing himself into the furnace, or something. Yay, hasta la vista baby.
The lesson seems obscure at best, dubious at worst, but if anyone knows the story, please advise.
I have made available for APR Patrons the following:
1) “Titan III B-C-D-E Propulsion Handbook,” from Aerojet, explaing and diagramming just about everything you want to know about the Titan III propulsion systems, from the SRMs to the Transstage. I originally got this via ebay.
(This shows just a small portion of the ~300 page handbook)
2) “Aircraft Descriptive Data for Northrop F-89F.” A collection of then-current data on the projected (and unbuilt) F-89F. This was from a collection gathered by Lockheed to keep tabs on their competitors. Has some “Secret” markings on it. I originally got this via ebay.
3) Skylab diagram. This very large format illustration was found in the NASA HQ and photographed piecemeal and painstakingly reassembled, using text scanned from another copy of the illustration (with a far smaller diagram, but good text).
4) An original layout diagram of the XB-70. It took several years to get this diagram into this shape. It seems pretty good to me.
You can gain access to these by becoming an APR Patron for as little as $1.50 a month. That’s not so very much, is it? Check out the APR Patreon page for more details.
In general, I can complete a diagram for the US Aerospace Projects series in anywhere from a handful of hours to a couple man-days, depending on detail and how much 3D work I need to do (the Space Cruiser from US Spacecraft Projects #2 was a chore because a lot of time was spent on 3D modeling). But even at the long end of the bell curve, this would seem to indicate that I should be able to finish a full set of 8 vehicle diagrams in a week or less. But it hasn’t worked out that way; it’s usually quite a bit longer. Why? Because the diagramming is pretty much the *last* stage in the process.
In order to come up with 8 diagrams, I have to decide on 8 vehicles. Sometimes that’s easy, like when I have a known design series that I’m working on (the B-52 & B-59 series in USBP, for example). Sometimes I get obsessed that I have to do some particular design… the Space Cruiser was one such. And then the next step after deciding on which vehicle is collecting the info needed on each one.
In many cases, I have all the info I need. I have a number of Space Cruiser documents I’ve collected over the years, enough to do the project justice. But just because I have a document doesn’t necessarily mean I *remember* that I have the document… or when I do remember it, remember where I put it. I spend quite a while digging for a document on SC that I only halfway vaguely remembered that I had.
And then when I find the documents, there’s the going through them, looking for the relevant and useful bits. Sometimes that’s easy: the whole thing is described in a single AIAA paper that has four pages and one diagram. Limited data means a limited diagram and description on my part. But sometimes the design is buried in *vast* reports, or scattered across a number of presentations. And while there might be thousands of pages, there are only a few pages that are directly valuable. Such as a design I’m digging up now for US Launch Vehicle Projects #1, for which the research stack is the entire box you see here:
FYI: the cardboard box under the plastic box contains a series of GD SSTO reports for future use; the half-filled box behind is a small fraction of my wholly uncatalogued Saturn/Apollo collection.
So if you see me flacking a US “X” P publication and think that I’m just slapping these things together… ah… no. Simple though they may look, they are each the result of a *lot* of work, often based on reports that I gathered ten, fifteen years ago hoping to *someday* find some use for.
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I’ve been tinkering with Pax Orionis since the release of US Spacecraft Projects #2. I’m still roughing out the historical outline from Then to Now; I have 16,000+ words, or roughly 50+ paperback pages. While I know the general thrust of the overall story, I’m still kinda torn on *how* to approach parts of it. Parts of it I want to do like a dry government history report, or perhaps something like a PhD dissertation. Other parts like a technical manual. Other parts like standard third person narrative. Any of these would be fine on their own, but it seems like it might be odd to do all three. But would it? Would a book that alternates – a history chapter, a fiction chapter, a tech chapter, rinse and repeat – be a sensible way to go, or would it just annoy the hell out of people? I’ve seen a number of books (Lord of the Rings springs to mind) that have a long unified fictional yarn that ends with a dry factual Appendix, so I know that at least that approach makes some sort of sense.
One of the closest analogies to what I’m hoping to accomplish is World War Z (book, not movie), where tales are told covering many years and many people across the planet. Most of the characters would come in, play their role, then fade away rather than run through the whole narrative. Look at the last 50 years of *actual* history… any novel-length history of that period would either have to be an actual biography, or very few historical figures would carry all the way through from beginning to end.
The purpose of the historical dissertation would be for the fictional author to try to understand the world of alternate 2010 (plus or minus a few years). Because that world is not only *massively* different from ours, it’s also *massively* trashed. Very, very bad things have happened and a whole lot has been lost, including historical records. Just *how* did the world come to this?
Any suggestions or critiques of the idea welcomed.