Now it’s the “TravelNevada.com Reno National Championship Air Races and Air Show Presented by Breitling.”
Ugh.
So… TN.comRNCARaASPbB. Just rolls off the tongue. Or would it be TNdcRNCARaASPbB?
I certainly understand the need to sell naming rights in order to gin up some cash… but this seems a bit much.
Supposedly one of the tail fins screwed up early on, preventing the scramjet powered vehicle from getting up to speed.
The Convair B-58 Hustler grew out of a long series of design studies dating back to the years immediately following World War II. Early concepts called for small jet bombers carried aloft by B-36 or B-60 bombers, and would shed jet engine pods during the mission. These massively complex and expensive systems evolved over time to the somewhat more straightforward B-58 which was a single stage aircraft carrying an underslung pod containing both jet fuel and a single nuclear weapon. But even that was originally intended to be a rocket powered missile.
The B-58 evolved directly from the MX-1964 design from 1952. This is recognizably related to the B-58, but had the four jet engines in two pods rather than four, and a higher degree of integration between the pod and aircraft.
Compared to Spaceship Two, Lynx is a dinky little guy, and should prove to be simpler to maintain and operate, meaning faster turnaround. And take this with a grain of salt, but XCOR is estimating first Lynx test flights this year and first paying flights in 2013.
The Lynx has another advantage over SS2 in that it is a single stage vehicle. But it’s interesting to contemplate how it might perform as a second stage… perhaps even carried to altitude by SS2’s White Knight. I suspect a good case could be made for a military mission using a C-130 or C-17 as a carrier aircraft. Haul the Lynx to the proper latitude, launch the Lynx either off the top or beneath a wing, and then capture the Lynx again at the end of the mission. While actually docking the gliding Lynx to the C-17 would be ridiculously challenging, unreeling a tow cable and having the Lynx connect to it probe-and-drogue refueling style might be practical.
The XP-71 was a sizable Curtiss-Wright design from 1941 for a long range escort fighter. Irritatingly little has been publicly revealed about it. This is assuredly not due to the XP-71 being such an incredibly advanced design (although it was incredibly complex), but rather due to it having been a failed concept. Armed with two 37mm and one 75mm cannon, the XP-71 was bigger and substantially more expensive than a medium bomber such as the B-25, and would likely have been less nimble than a smaller fighter. While the armament would have packed a mighty whollop, targeting an Me 109 or a Zero would have been a matter of great luck or incredible skill. The XP-71 effort lasted from 1941 to 1943.
While I’ve recently been clued in on a Curtiss-Wright report with some good drawings of an oddly swept-wing version of the XP-71 (release of further info currently embargoed), very few decent quality drawings seem to have been released. One of the very few “official” three-views is a rather small diagram from a NACA report describing a great many spin-tests. I’ve not yet located the specific test reports dealing with the XP-71.
A decade ago I wrote a bunch of issues of APR, and mailed them out as photocopies. Half a decade ago, I started completely reworking those issues to be released digitally, first on CD-ROM and then as downloads. Then a year or so ago I started making the newest re-worked issues compatible with MagCloud so that customers could purchase printed copies. But all of Volume 1 and most of Volume 2 have not been made available on MagCloud – they just weren’t formatted properly. Wrong margins and, worse, some random 11X17 pages.
When I finished with Packfile #2, German Rocketplanes, I started reworking the reworked editions of Volume 1 for MagCloud. It’s slower going than I’d like… Microsoft Word 1997 is a fine program, but one thing it kinda goes bonkers at is a large document where the fonts and margins are globally changed. Everything gets scattered hither and yon for reasons that are obscure to me. However, I’ve got the first 3 issues more or less hammered into shape. They question is: how much more hammering?
Spelling and grammar errors I fix when I see ’em. Factual errors are changed (such as V1N3, where I repeatedly and inexplicably refer to the clearly labeled Bell “SeaKat” as the “SkyKat” and sometimes “SkyCat”). But with some of the articles, new information has come my way since the original publication. Additional drawings or other imagery; improved quality versions of what I originally had. The CAD drawings I made starting in V1N2 can be improved and reformatted; a number of designs from V1N1 could have CAD drawings made of them. But should I go to the bother? Would reworking some of these things *again* be worth my time and your money?
I guess that’s the question. I don’t expect to sell but maybe a handful of MagCloudified copies of APR issues. In all the years I’ve been including my own CAD layout drawings I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a single message that said either “they add usefully to the description” or “those are a waste of space.” So: if you were on the fence about getting a MagCloud printed copy of, say V1N3, would the inclusion of a few new bits of vintage imagery push you over? Would new or revised CAD drawings do anything for you?
You know engineers, they love to change things. So I’m tempted to try to make these doubly-revised articles as complete as I can with new stuff. But that might be time and effort better spent on some other, more productive task.
Speak your piece.
It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but if you have a supersonic aircraft it often performs better at high speeds if it’s tail end is “draggier” than it is at low speeds. This is due to the fact that as the vehicle pushes past the speed of sound, the airflow over the vehicle, or at least over its control surfaces, can get disrupted and basically turn to mush. Consequently, the tail surfaces need to be larger, or extend further out, in order to “grab” onto some proper airflow.
This seems to be especially pronounced with lifting body designs, where a fat fuselage forms a fat, widely-expanding flowfield of mush that the control surfaces need to project past. For the X-24A, this was accomplished by having large body flaps that would angle further and further out as speed increased, turning the vehicle into a “shuttlecock” configuration.
Not for the faint of heart…
[youtube I5DH2-kDLXk]
NOW AVAILABLE: PACKFILE NO.2 “GERMAN ROCKET PLANES”
the latest from Justo Miranda, 180 pages including three-view 1/72 scale drawings of 98 airplanes together with a brief history and technical data (English text).
| Arado Ar 234 R(a) Arado Ar 234 R(b) Arado E 381/I Arado E 381/II Arado E 381/III Arado TEW 16/43-13 Arado TEW 16/43-15 Bachem Ba 349 A “Natter” Bachem Ba 349 A-1 “Natter” Bachem Ba 349 B “Natter Blohm und Voss BV 40 Blohm und Voss BV P.178 Von Braun Interceptor (Stage I) Von Braun Interceptor (Stage II) DFS 194 DFS 228 DFS 230 DFS 332 DFS 346 DFS “Rammer” EMW/A4b EMW A9/A10 EMW A6 Espenlaub/Valier “Rak 3” Espenlaub EA-1 Espenlaub E-15 Fieseler Fi 166 “Höhenjäger I” Fieseler Fi 166 “Höhenjäger II” Focke Wulf P.011.001 (PV) Focke Wulf Ta 183 Ra-1 Focke Wulf P IV Focke Wulf P VII “Flitzer” |
Focke Wulf Ta 283 Focke Wulf Fw 250 “Super Lorin” Focke Wulf “Triebflügel” Focke Wulf “Volksjäger” Focke Wulf “Rammjäger” “Frau im Mond” Lunar Rocket Gotha Go 345 Gotha “Rammer” Heinkel He 112 V3 Heinkel He 176 V1 Heinkel He 176 V2 Heinkel He P.1077 “Julia I” Heinkel He P.1077 “Julia II” Horten HoXIIIB Junkers EF-127 “Dolly” Junkers EF.127 A “Wally” Lippisch “Ente” Lippisch/Fritz von Opel Rak 1929 Lippisch P01-113 Lippisch P01-114 Lippisch P01-115 Lippisch P01-116 Lippisch P01-117 Lippisch P01-118 Lippisch P01-119 Lippisch P05 (August 1941) Lippisch P09 (May 1942) Lippisch P11 (September 1942) Lippisch P11 (December 1942) Lippisch DM-1 Lippisch DM-1 (NACA #8) Lippisch DM-2 Lippisch DM-3 |
Lippisch P.13a Entwurf I Lippisch P.13a Entwurf II Lippisch P.13a Entwurf III Messerschmitt Me 163 A Messerschmitt Me 163 B-1 Messerschmitt Me 163 C Messerschmitt Me 263/Ju 248 Messerschmitt Me 262 C-1a “Heimatschützer I” Messerschmitt Me 262 C-1b “Heimatschützer II” Messerschmitt Me 262 C-3a “Heimatschützer III” Messerschmitt Me 262 “Interceptor” Messerschmitt Me 262 HG III Entwurf III Messerschmitt Me P1092B Messerschmitt Me P1103 (6 July 1944) Messerschmitt Me P1103 (6 July 1944) Messerschmitt Me P1103 (12 Setp 1944) Messerschmitt Me P1104 (10 Aug 1944) Messerschmitt Me P1104 (22 Sept 1944) Messerschmitt Me P1103 B Messerschmitt Me P1106 R Opel-Saunders/Hatry “Rak-1” Sänger Rocket Plane 1931 Sänger Bredt Rocket Bomber 1943 Siebel Mistel Projekt Entwurf I Siebel Mistel Projekt Entwurf II Sombold So.344 Valier Rocket Airplane Type 1 Valier Rocket Airplane Type 2 Valier Rocket Airplane Type 3 Valier Rocket Airplane Type 4 Valier RF-1 Zeppelin “Fliegende Panzerfaust” Zeppelin “Rammer”
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Packfile #2 can be purchased as a downloadable 100 megabyte PDF for $24.
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Be sure to check out the rest of Justo Mirandas publications HERE.
A drawing of the T250 Vigilante anti-aircraft gun, towed version. The T250 is fairly poorly documented, even though it was built, tested and mounted to an extended M-113 chassis. The T250 certainly looks like the M61 Vulcan gatling gun, but there was a difference: unlike the 20mm M61, the T250 was a hefty 37mm caliber.
The T250 was begun in 1956 at Springfield Armory. It had a rate of fire of 3000 rpm, and had a 192 round drum magazine. While the 37mm round hit like a freight train, apparently the problem was that the integrated system couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, so the Vigilante system was replaced with the Mauler automated anti-aircraft missile system… which was also cancelled.
