In lieu of anything resembling a social life, I’ve been working on this…
… along with a few other projects. At one point late Friday night I looked out the window and thought, hey, what’s that, and realized that it wasn’t Friday night anymore:
That’s a hell of a thing to see when you’re expecting pitch black.
A model currently being CADded: a little friend for the Rocinante.
Great googaly moogaly:
How much dos this cost? Well, I looked it up online… and I’ve never spent that much for a *car.*
So, this happened:
The “Haunebu II” is a purported late-war Nazi German design for a flying saucer. There are a *lot* of model kits out there for “Luftwaffe, 1946” designs… wacky or otherwise interesting unbuilt aircraft designs produced in Nazi Germany. I myself began my interest in unbuilt aircraft and spacecraft projects with Luft’46 designs… largely because in the late 1980’s, those were just about the *only* designs widely available for advanced unbuilt aircraft. That’s the thing: if you lose a war, you lose control over your secret designs, so all the German stuff was available. But American designs? We were able to keep them secret. In the decades since, interest in non-Nazi unbuilt projects has of course exploded, so now publications loaded with American “secret projects” are readily at hand.
But there’s the problem: Haunebu II is bullcrap. This and other “Nazi flying saucers” are pure post-war fictions without scrap of evidentiary basis. Instead, they are simply cash-grabs by people wanting a piece of that UFO-nutburger market, combined with a dollop of neo-Nazi fantasizing. Most of these designs didn’t exist in any form until the 80’s or so.
At one level, for this model that’s ok. People have been making model kits of science fiction subjects for generations. The problem here is that apparently Revells packaging and information on the instructions did not point out that this was an unbuilt design, did not point out that it’s a post-war fiction… apparently it said that this thing actually not only flew, it flew into space. It said that the Nazis were the first into space thanks to this thing.
Gah.
As someone interested in accurate history, that sort of thing is grating, to say the least. I would have demanded that Revell revise the info. But the problem for Revell is that they are a *German* company, and in Germany it’s verbotten to glorify the Nazis (I’m unaware if it is equally illegal to glorify the Soviets…). So it seems that Revell has yanked this kit from the market, possibly for good. On the one hand… meh. Until this news hit, I was unaware that Revell was making this kit, and I would not have been interested in it anyway. On the other hand, yay for getting rid of false history. On the gripping hand, boo for censorship.
As an exercise, google “haunebu.” You’ll find a *lot* of references. Many of these will be news items about this model getting yanked. Others will be reviews and online sales for similar models produced by other manufactures. And there’ll be a *lot* of hits for sites describing the Haunebu series as real designs; of then these sites add a whole lot of additional supernatural/magical woo on top. But in all that, *try* to find sites that point out that these things are BS. Facts and the truth are buried under mountains of nonsense and outright lies, to the point that a lot of people actually believe that the Nazis had these damned flying saucers.
Ugh.
So, it’s an article about what *one* scientist thinks a “perfect” human would look like if said human was genetically engineered with bits of other animals. Granted, some ideas for genetic engineering upgrades make some kind of sense… stranger hearts less susceptible to attacks, better immune systems, more acute hearing, better eyesight, blah, blah, blah. But those could be done with, presumably, little to no change to the actual *form* of the baseline human. But this suggestion goes a little further than that:
Yeah. Ummmm… no.
In order for a human to be “better,” it would need to be able to reproduce. It seems very likely that a human modified to such an extent would not be genetically compatible and physically able to reproduce with a stock human, so this would be effectively a new species. But even if it was compatible, and the major changes were made genetically dominant so they would carry over unchanged into the next generation, there is another problem with reproducing this type of human:
Yuck.
In order to breed, ya generally gotta *want* to breed. Granted, I speak for nobody but myself, and I know there are a lot of guys who’ll do just about anything, and a lot of guys who are into furries and such, but the concept shown here is not exactly… inspiring.
Box art of Fantastic Plastic’s 1/144 Rocinante model has been released. The kit will be released soon, I gather. Sign up and get in on the list before the only ones that are available are on eBay…
OK, physical prep work on the 3D printed parts is now complete and the model is ready to be shipped off for casting. Below are photos of the model parts simply taped together (the lower loop is bent upwards a bit due to being simply held together with tape). The model kit should prove fairly straightforward to build; there are only a few pieces:
1: Top shell
2: Bottom shell
3: Bridge
4: Lounge
5: Top loop
6: Mid loop
7: Bottom loop
8: Underside of shuttlebay
And that’s it.
If you want one – and you really should – it will be available from Fantastic Plastic. Send them an email to reserve a copy. this is an important thing to do… let’s ’em know roughly how many to make. Like a lot of kits like these, only a limited number will be made.
In the 1960’s, prior to the Space Shuttle program, General Dynamics/Convair studied using the Atlas ICBM as a space launch system. no surprise there. But one concept called for a nearly fully reusable Atlas, equipped with wings, jet engines, landing gear and a cockpit to recover the booster in one reusable piece. It would be topped with either an expendable Centaur and satellite/space probe upper stage or a smallish manned lifting body spaceplane with its own built-in propulsive capability. At the time General Dynamics released sizable “educational” cards with information and photos of models of the reusable Atlas. Unlike the normal Atlas, this version did not drop the outboard “booster’ engines, but kept them throughout the mission. An inflatable, deployable afterbody was proposed to fair over the engines after burnout to reduce base drag.
I have uploaded righ-rez scans of both sides of this poster-sized card to the 2018-05 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons at the $4 level and up.
Additionally, a report on this concept is available as Space Doc 52.
If you are interested in these Reusable Atlas model images and a great many other “extras” and monthly aerospace history rewards, please sign up for the APR Patreon. What else are you going to spend $4 a month on?
Pretty much the final version of the CAD model of the Northrop Low Altitude Penetrator. Some surface details and OML smoothing to be finished up by hand, but this pretty much completes this phase of the project.
The coloring is to distinguish parts for the kit.
This project sorta fell by the wayside, but it’s now approaching completion.
