I just came across this. So far I’ve failed to get it to admit to actually having *anything; no search term or combination of search terms results in any hits. But perhaps it is new; perhaps it’s a work in progress… or perhaps all the good stuff is behind some AF firewall. Dunno. But I thought y’all might find it of interest… and if anyone has any success with it, let me know how and with what.
https://efoia.milcloud.mil/(S(vovixi10c1twlmkm50inkazg))/App/ReadingRoom.aspx
As is known far and wide, I’m not well known. What little fame I have is largely bound up is the aerospace history research and illustration I’ve done; I’m *hoping* that when the two books I’m working on now get published things will change a bit (well, I hope my *work* gains a bit of fame; I’ve little use for *me* becoming famous). Still: while I toil in obscurity, I find that the products of my labor do have a tendency to pop up here and there. Usually when the diagrams I’ve created are used by someone else there’s some sort of attribution… but not always. There’s little to nothing that can be done about that, of course. Just sorta grit my teeth and move on.
So I watched this video, gritted my teeth and will, I suppose, move on. Note that it uses diagrams I created for Aerospace Projects Review issue V1N3 and US Transport Projects #07. What I suppose was funny was that when I started watching the video I largely *expected* to see my diagrams to show up in it… and, yup, there they are. As of this writing, the video has had about half a million views, not a one of which read where the diagrams came from.
UPDATE: After comms with the video maker: it seems he received the diagrams from someone else claiming them as their own. There have been revisions to the description including proper attribution. If this all pans out, there may be collaborations in the future.
An eBay seller in Britain is selling, one by one, a series of diagrams of WWII-era aircraft. They all seem to have been produced by the same draftsman, or at least the same publisher, to a common standard. So… who published these? The seller’s prices aren’t too shabby, but he’s sold out of a fair number of them and the cross-Atlantic shipping fee is ridiculously high. Anyone familiar with them? Were they published in a magazine, a book, separately?
An exploded view of the Marquardt ramjet engine that powered the Lockheed D-21B. The engine was derived from the ramjet that powered the Bomarc missile; interestingly, it went from a SAM engine that ran for at most fifteen minutes to a continent-crossing drone engine that ran for an hour and a half. The D-21 program was riddled with failures, but the engine was not a real source of trouble. What did become a minor source of trouble: after the seventeen surviving D-21s were mothballed, the nosecones of the engines had to be specially removed: being made of a thorium alloy, they were slightly radioactive.
A recently donated blueprint of the AGM-69A Short Range Attack Missile:
I’ve made available to above-$10 subscribers and patrons both the full resolution scan of the above, as well as a processed clearer B&W version. If you’d be interested in helping to preserve aerospace history such as this, as well as receiving bonus content like this, please consider signing up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
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Amazon sorta randomly suggested a book to me:
I’m not generally an architecture aficionado, but somehow this does seem to kinda appeal to me. I suspect it’s the black and white diagrams, the sort of thing that has *always* appealed to me:
It sure looks interesting and well produced. but then you read the customer reviews and, man, some of them are brutal. It seems that for a lot of people the choice of silver ink on a black background was disastrous. Something that looks great in the photos apparently comes off as difficult to see in real life. This would not be the first time that a neato book project was damaged by a Cool Idea that turned out to not work as well as hoped.
Still… kinda interested.
The rewards for APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents program subscribers have been sent out. Included in the November 2020 rewards package are:
1: A diagram of a proposed DC-9 aft propfan research configuration
2: A Kaman K-Max brochure
3: A preliminary draft/outline for a report on F-108 employment
4: A CAD diagram of the M61A1 Vulcan
If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
In the long long ago this blog focused far more on “unbuilt aerospace projects.” Last few years it has become far more about the culture war/war on western civilization/The Crazy Years. This is not how I would have it… but then if it were up to me society wouldn’t be going crazy either, cities would not be getting trashed, Antifa and their violence and criminality promotion would be the stuff of alternate realities, the likely next President and the likely next *next* President would not be promising to toss me, my friends and family into federal prison. This sort of thing can kinda come to dominate a discussion.
All that said, aerospace is never far from my mind or my efforts. The thing is, though, my efforts have been devoted to a few books that I’ve got contracts to produce. This is a new sort of thing, and it is unsurprisingly a substantial time-sink. And since the publisher has not gone public with the books (they won’t until after the manuscripts are turned in next year), there’s not a lot I can say about them publicly.
*THAT* said, below is a render of a little CAD model I’ve recently made. The model is not the subject of the book; but it has been made for the purposes of making *one* diagram of a vehicle that incorporates this. One might argue that this is going a bit far for a small part of a diagram; this part of the diagram might be only an inch or so long. But while it is possible that these books might see a Second Edition, at this point I’m working under the assumption that I’m only doing this once, so I want to do it right.
So I still spend a whole lot of time with aerospace. It just doesn’t translate to blog postings right now.
Rewards have just been posted for APR Patrons/Monthly Historical Documents Program subscribers. Included:
1: “Manned Aerodynamic Reusable Spaceship (MARS) Vehicle Design” a 1962 Douglas report covering a single stage “orbital airplane” of impressive size and design.
2: “Pretest Information 3.3 Percent 624A Aerodynamic Heating Investigation, NASA Langley Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel.” A 1963 Martin report describing a test of the Titan IIIC/Dyna Soar configuration.
3: Official XB-70 General Arrangement Diagram
4: CAD diagram: a 1974 Lockheed concept for a subscale Space Shuttle Orbiter Mach 9 flight test model, to be dragged behind a YF-12C and booster by an “Avanti” rocket (modification of the D-21B’s booster) with an internal SRAM motor in the orbiter.
If this sort of thing is of interest to you, either because you’d like to obtain these documents or you’d like to help preserve aerospace history (or both) please consider signing on to either the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Now here’s an odd thing…
Part of the collection of images from the Cradle of Aviation Museum, Garden City, NY, this depicts a Republic Aviation concept circa early 1960’s for putting a scramjet vehicle atop a Titan II first stage. Presumably this is meant to be… I dunno, a space launcher? No wings are in evidence, so cruise flight and a landing seem unlikely. But it would seem a hell of a thing to throw away, so *presumably* it was meant to be recovered somehow. Perhaps it shed the entire payload-containing nosecone and came back using the blunt forward dome of the propellant tank as a heat shield, followed by a splashdown. Dunno.
Also in the collection is the “AX-92 detailed drawing.” Clearly this is an entirely serious proposal, and not at all an example of an artist screwing around for giggles.
