I’m currently running a sale on downloadable aerospace items that I had planned on either not releasing or not releasing yet. Twenty-eight pretty nifty items of considerable interest to aerospace aficionados. The sale is open to APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents Program subscribers for one week only. If any of these look interesting, consider signing up.
One of the main purposes of the Monthly Historical Documents Program/APR Patreon is to get rare aerospace items from eBay. These items are then made available to subscribers/patrons via monthly votes and catalogs.
Below are some of the items I’ve recently paid for (though not as yet received). If you are interested in getting high-rez scans and/or helping me save these sort of things for future generations (as well as keeping my cats in food and litter), please consider signing up for the Monthly Historical Documents Program or the APR Patreon.
A report I scored off ebay some time back had a number of conceptual Douglas designs for supersonic tanker aircraft. Gotta scan this in at some point…
The diagrams of aircraft and spacecraft that I produce tend to have additional “scale references” to provide a sense of how big – or small – the vehicle in question is. For years I’ve been selecting human figures from a mess of ’em I’ve found or created… but I believe I need more. What I’m looking for are photos of soldiers, pilots, ground crew and the like shown in full-body and side or front view, sort of orthographic views. If anyone has or knows of such, I’d appreciate a heads-up.
Something I’ve considered from time to time is procuring a large “GI Joe”-type figure and a bunch of accessories, then setting it in various poses and photographing it. But I’ve just never gotten around to that.
So after a long hiatus while I worked on The Book That Shall Not Yet Be Named, I started off a return to prior form by creating the diagrams for US Fighter Projects #4. That went pretty quickly, with some of the designs taking only a day to create the diagram. I then launched into US VTOL projects #3… and the going has been much slower. A single aircraft has taken the better part of two weeks to piece together the diagrams. This was due to the complexity of the design and the fact that it would undergo some fairly substantial configuration changes between horizontal and vertical flight.
Huzzah:
In 1969, Maxime Faget of NASA-Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed Johnson Space Center) produced a concept for a simplified version of the Space Shuttles then being designed. The idea at the time was that the Shuttle would be a two-stage vehicle, both being fully reusable manned flyback vehicles. The Orbiter would be much larger than the Orbiter that actually got built because it included substantial hydrogen/oxygen tankage. The boosters were generally *vast* vehicles larger than the C-5 Galaxy meant to fly higher and faster than the X-15. Optimistic to be sure. Faget’s “DC-3” design had the same basic architecture but attempted to produce a smaller, cheaper, less complex and more realistic design. The design, produced in-house at NASA, was picked up by both North American and McDonnell Douglas, who designed their own variations on the theme.
Here is the basic configuration of the NASA-MSC “DC-3:”
I am busy at work on US VTOL Projects #3 to be released at the same time as US Fighter Projects #4. USVP#3 is not as far along, but it’s getting there. Here’s a first glimpse:
There have been a lot of “personal air vehicles” designed over the last decade, most designed for VTOL operations and many with purely electric propulsion systems. One such design – which I can’t vouch for on either technical or financial fronts – is the Delorean DR-7 from Delorean Aerospace, founded by the nephew of *that* Delorean.
Their website, lean on details:
http://www.deloreanaerospace.com/
An article from 2017:
And a patent (US9862486B2):
Now that THE BOOK has been delayed a tad, I’m back to working on projects that had fallen by the wayside. one of these is US Fighter Projects #4. Here’s a first look at the contents…
Enjoy.