A bit short of a week ago I posted artwork of a “Boeing Advanced Fighter.” This led to the re-discovery of the actual model number 987-350 (I knew it some time back, but my brain is full I guess). And that led to the below CAD diagram, coming in just under the wire for a forthcoming book. The 987-350 was a tactical supercruiser; armament is unfortunately left a bit vague in the available documentation. The artwork depicts it with four folding-fin AGM-69 SRAM missiles; another diagram depicts it with two larger-diameter missiles of similar length. All were to be semi-submerged for low drag.
The original “Scooby Doo” show was important and useful because while every episode had some supernatural badguy – ghosts and monsters and such – at the end it always turned out that the actual badguy was just some actual human, no supernatural elements required. Just villainy and petty evil. it taught kids – maybe, if they paid attention – the value of skepticism when it came to supernatural threats. Since then, whenever I’ve checked in on the franchise there seem to be *actual* ghost pirates and pirate ghosts. Bah.
The video below is a bit of satire based on the idea that the Scooby gang, instead of pursuing such minor evils as someone trying to take over a theme park, went after Commies in the 1950’s. I could get behind that, because as much as Hollywood likes to pretend that Commies weren’t real or weren’t a threat… Commies were, unlike the “fascists” that modern day fanatics are constantly screaming about, actual threats and caused the US and its allies no end of lives and treasure. So having the Scooby gang sniffing them out might have made things a hell of a lot better. Imagine if Scooby had gotten hold of Klaus Fuchs before he shipped Mannhattan Project data to Stalin. Or if he simply followed the likes of AOC around and barked “Commie!” at her nonstop.
The video kinds craps on its own premise by having the Scooby gang feel bad for having investigated Commies.
The National Reconnaissance Office is starting a series on the history of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, a small space lab that was designed in the early/mid 1960s for the Air Force. Officially just a basic space lab, in reality it was an advanced (for the time) spy satellite. So far there is only Part One on the NRO website, and there’s not much to it… but we’ll see how it goes.
A mere sixteen years ago I posted artwork of the Martin “EGRESS” ejection capsule meant to fling crew from a stricken spacecraft anywhere up to and including orbit. Those scans came from photocopies of a conference paper. I have at last now scanned the same work, producing slightly better results. The artwork is remarkable for one detail in particular: of the two crewmen, one is clearly Lance Squarejaw, wholly unfazed at his situation. The other is… not unfazed. I’d pay real money to get at the original color painting.
The whole thing – diagrams and art scanned at 600 DPI – will be offered up to APR Patrons & Subscribers soon.
Another early 80s advanced fighter concept from Boeing. This one used Viggen-like close coupled canards and vectorable 2D exhaust nozzles for aerial agility. Stealth seems to have been a minimal concern, with performance being more important. The inlets and overall aerodynamcis suggest supersonic cruise. Four sizable missiles – possible SRAM nuclear-tipped surface attack missiles – are semi-submerged in the belly for reduced drag. No further data.
Fell rez scan is in the 2022-11 APR Extras Dropbox folder.
The original USS Enterprise model is back in the restoration shop at the National Air & Space Museum. Adam Savage got to go in and take a close look at it, and you can *feel* just how hard it was to not get handsy with the thing.
A Boeing rendering of an advanced fighter from the late 70’s/early 80’s. This design features variable sweep wings and inlets mounted over the shoulders, reminiscent of the Boeing Model 818 design proposed in the early 1960s for the TFX program (won by General Dynamics, resulting in the F-111… check out “US Supersonic Bomber Projects Vol 1” for more on that). There are four weapons mounted conformally to the underside. All in all it looks like an early attempt at a *somewhat* stealthy aircraft… not true stealth, but a substantial reduction in radar return, specifically from ground-based radar. This would seem to indicate that the aircraft was intended to generally fly low and to serve in a strike capacity.
The configuration is broadly conventional, apart from the inlets. The twin exhaust nozzles are 2D vectorable, reducing IR signature and increasing agility and short field takeoff performance. The twin tails are canted outboard, probably to knock out the “corner reflector” problem for radar returns. This was likely intended to be something of a replacement for the F-111 rather than the next air dominance fighter like the F-15.
The full rez scan has been uploaded into the 2022-11 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for $4 and up Patrons/Subscribers.
The B-17 “Texas Raider” was hit by a bell P-63 Kingcobra today at the Wings Over Dallas airshow. Both planes broke apart in midair and crashed.Hard to imagine that anyone on either plane survived. It *almost* looked as if the P-63 aimed at the B-17 (I doubt it could have hit the bomber any worse if the goal was destruction), but that seems really unlikely.
