Nov 012022
 

The October 2022 rewards are available for APR Patrons and Subscribers. This latest package includes:

Large format art: A Bell Aerospace painting of the D188A VTOL fighter/bomber

Document: “Standard Aircraft Characteristics – Convair Class VF Seaplane Night Fighter (SKATE)” diagrams and data for seaplane jet fighter

Document: “21St Century Aerospace – The 20th Century Challenge,” General Dynamics presentation, late 80’s about hypersonics/NASP. From photographs.

Document: “Prototype X-14 VTOL Aircraft,” Bell Aerospace presentation, 1971, on the “SeaKat” operational naval VTOL. From photos, but art and diagrams were also scanned for clarity.

CAD Diagram ($5 and up): XB-70 Valkyrie forward fuselage configuration

 

If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.




 Posted by at 1:30 am
Oct 312022
 

Back in the Bad Old Days, a whole lot of people were trapped as serfs. While not technically slaves, they kinda were… they were legally trapped onto a particular piece of property and had to work for the landowner (generally some flavor of “nobility”). You could get in a *lot* of trouble if  you just decided to get up and walk twenty miles away. It’s a good thing that that concept is dead and buried. Right?

Right?

Behold the “15-Minute City.” As described on Wikipedia, this is straightforward enough… a form of civic planning where the bulk of your necessities – groceries and such – are available within a short walk (you can walk there in “15 minutes”). It *sounds*… well, maybe sorta kinda nice enough, maybe, on a limited basis; probably more so for people who have never actually known wide open spaces, but there are of course large sections of urban areas where groceries and medicine and whatnot are *not* available anywhere near you. But whether it was the intention of the people behind it or not, the “15-minute city” concept is a lead-in to modern serfdom. Gentlemen, behold:

Anger after travel chief announces traffic filters are ‘going to happen, definitely’ ahead of decision

Mr Enright explained in the Sunday Times that the heart of the traffic filters policy was to turn Oxford into “a 15-minute city” with local services within a small walking radius.

The new traffic filters on St Cross Road, Thames Street, Hythe Bridge Street and St Clements would operate seven days a week from 7am to 7pm.

Two more filters on Marston Ferry Road and Hollow Way would operate from Monday to Saturday.

People can drive freely around their own neighbourhood and can apply for a permit to drive through the filters, and into other neighbourhoods, for up to 100 days per year. This equates to an average of two days per week.

 

Translation: if this comes to pass, people within these “15 minute cities” will only be allowed to freely leave their plots of land 100 days out of the year by means of their own vehicles. Sure, you can walk out… but how far can you walk, carrying all your property? Sure, you can ride public transportation… which goes where it goes, not necessarily where you want to go. And I look forward to seeing people try to carry their beds and fridges and libraries on the bus. And sure, you can leave 100 days out of the year. Then 90. Then 75. Then 50. Then “papers please.”

The process seems to be to slowly acclimate Brits to accept that where they are is where they’ll stay.

Curiously, at the same time the British citizens are being trained to become sedentary, to reduce their horizons to little further than they could throw a rock (not that they’ll be allowed to throw a rock, of curse), they are also being trained to accept that an Englishmans Home Is Not His Castle:

Homeowners are being offered contracts to take in illegal Channel migrants as govt hotel bill rises to £2.4bn-a-year

As Britain continues to be colonized by military age males from the third world, Brits are being conditioned to not only accept these world travelers into their country, but into their homes. Right now the British government is attempting to get this done via bribery. When that fails to take care of the problem, I’ll but utterly unsurprised when eminent domain is used to appropriate second homes, unoccupied apartments and other currently-unoccupied places. And when *that* fails to solve the problem – and why the hell would it, as the British government would be throwing the door open to a full invasion, providing room and board to the latest waves of colonizers – then people who are deemed to have Too Much House will be required to share. Got a barn? Not anymore. Got a spare bedroom? Not anymore. Got a living room? Not anymore.

 

Haha. I got me a 3rd Amendment, chumps!

 Posted by at 11:59 am
Oct 302022
 

The YouTube channel “Found and Explained” just released a video on the 4,000 ton Orion Battleship, with the model used based on my reconstruction from issue V2N2 of “Aerospace Projects Review.” The video was sponsored by a “Star Trek” video game, so there are a *lot* of Star Trek references in the video.

For more information on the project, including blueprints, be sure to check out issue v2N2.

 Posted by at 6:21 pm
Oct 302022
 

A Boeing concept from 1983 for an Orbital Transfer Vehicle. This vehicle would change the orbit of the payload not only propulsively, but by using aerodynamic drag to slow the vehicle at perigee. When returning a payload from geosynchronous orbit, it would dive into the upper atmosphere and use aerodynamic lift and drag to slow into a much lower orbit, with propulsive adjustments to put it into a circular orbit for rendezvous with a space Shuttle for recovery or servicing. This particular design was inflatable (creating a lifting body akin to a stretched-out “ASSET” shape) and used an extendable/stowable nozzle. Note that it is entering “upside down” so that the lift forces generated are trying to force it *closer* to Earth, rather than trying to bounce off the atmosphere.

 

Orbital velocities at geosynchronous are  slower than in low Earth orbit… about half the speed. So a relatively small change in velocity at geosynchronous will turn the circular orbit into a sharply elliptical one, with a perigee close to Earth. But that velocity at perigee is much faster than circular orbit velocity, so shedding speed using “free” aerodynamic forces makes sense… if you can pull it off.

 Posted by at 8:11 am
Oct 282022
 

Currently on ebay is an aluminum model of a lifting body. The rear of the vehicle is that of the M1 or M2, but the nose is distinctly conical. The lack of useful volume leads me to think that if this is a legit wind tunnel model (rather than something someone just knocked out at a machine shop for giggles), then it’s not a design for a manned vehicle, either test or operational space logistics. Rather it would be something like:

1) A basic subscale research vehicle like ASSET

2) A concept for a maneuverable entry vehicle for a military system. An ICBM warhead, perhaps designed to glide either for range extension, to avoid incoming ABMs, or to maneuver to avoid tracking systems and come in from unexpected directions.

3) Or it’s just a vague, generic “let’s look at everything” shape.

The nose of the model does not inspire a great deal of confidence… it looks a bit unfinished, with some sharp-ish corners that don’t seem like they should be there.

If anyone knows better, by all means speak up…

 

 Posted by at 1:46 pm
Oct 252022
 

Bell artwork circa 1983 depicting the proposed JVX tiltrotor, which would become the V-22 Osprey. The cockpit and the sponsons display the greatest obvious differences from the aircraft that would eventually be built, but the design seems to be largely just about there.

 

 Posted by at 6:05 pm
Oct 242022
 

A photo of a wind tunnel model of a Republic Aviation design for a Manned Hypersonic Test Vehicle configuration. The photo was published in 1969, but the program was circa 1965. It used a configuration previously studied as both an Aerospaceplane (airbreathing SSTO) and Mach 10 recon. That latter design was written about and illustrated in US Research & Recon Projects #2. You can tell that this is the subscale demonstrator, rather than one of the full-scale operational vehicles, because of the additional fuel tanks, projection from the lower fuselage. The fuselage was conical and ringed with a scramjet engine; a rocket engine in the tail would, after separation from a B-52 carrier aircraft, accelerate the vehicle past Mach 7 or so to scramjet operational speed.

 Posted by at 7:01 am
Oct 212022
 

Three magazine advertisements from 1960, depicting the East German Type 152 jetliner (which would have been a *fantastic* jetliner in the late 1940’s), the Convair F-106 and the Fiat G91 T jet trainer.

 

The full-rez scans of these ads have been uploaded into the 2022-10 APR Extras folder on Dropbox, available to all $4 and up APR Patrons/Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.




 

 

 Posted by at 1:29 pm
Oct 172022
 

Over the years there have been suggestions of using “lithobraking” as a means of reducing the cost of transporting payloads to the lunar surface. As the name suggests, the idea is to use the lunar surface itself – the lithosphere – to slow the craft. Meteoroids do this all the time, of course, though in their case it’s pretty destructive. But for those rare serious suggestion of using lithobraking, the idea would be to lay out a miles-long “track” of smooth lunar dust; the spacecraft would come in at a *very* shallow angle and touch down at extreme – essentially orbital – velocity, and use skids to brake using friction. The precision required, and lunar infrastructure required, would be pretty substantial. One early suggestion of what a lithobraking spacecraft might look like is this (from HERE):

It might be workable. But it’s not something I’ve seen demonstrated too often, either practically or in animated form. Well, until now. At last, we have a good video representation of what lithobraking might look like in actual practice:

 

 

 Posted by at 3:31 pm