A photo (dating from the 1950’s sometime) showing Dr. Abe Silverstein and Edward R. Sharp, Director of the NACA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, looking at a model of a ramjet equipped supersonic fighter concept. Unclear if this is a NACA design, but it does resemble something out of Lockheed.
Link to the full-rez HERE.
A poor-quality photo of a display model of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, made partially of plexiglas to permit a view of the interior. Appears to have been made by or for Air Force Space Systems Division. Image published in the February 17, 1964, issue of Missiles & Rockets magazine. This would have been an early design of the MOL. It’s difficult to determine size/scale of the model, but it looks reasonably large… probably at least 1/24 scale. Note that the transstage is shown attached, but it represented at low fidelity.
For the past few months, companies have been cranking out “Star Wars” branded merchandise. While I am kinda by definition the target market for the new Star Wars movie, having seen the original Star Wars in the theater three times at the age of seven, the vast, vast bulk of the Star Wars merchandise means precisely *nothing* to me. Plates and dishes and underwear and cups and soap and sex toys and breakfast cereal and board games and pop-up books and hats and socks and napkins and posters and whatnot, all plastered with the image of Kylo Ren or Finn or any of the other characters I know squadoo about? Meh.
On the other hand… toy spaceships. Those occasionally cause me to pause and take note. Probably shouldn’t come as too much of a shock. As money-sucking vices go, I imagine picking up the odd five-dollar toy spaceship is pretty minor compared to getting regularly likkered up or smoking like a chimney. So… new Star Wars spaceships. Woo!
The spaceships for the new Star Wars movies look like they follow in the best Star Wars design tradition… they look cool and don’t make a lick of sense. One of the craft featured in several toy formats is the “Kylo Ren Command Shuttle,” which is apparently a personnel transport for the main bad guy. The Shuttle, like the Imperial Shuttle from Return of the Jedi, features inexplicably large wings (what does a spacecraft equipped with antigravity need with wings of *any* size?) that fold up vertically for landing (just when wings might be most useful). The oddity is that all of the Command Shuttle toys or models I’ve seen any reference to all feature the wings in the vertical, landed configuration. I’ve not seen any with the wings in the “flight” configuration, which you’d think would be most interesting to the kiddies.
The die cast Disney Store toy.
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The tiny Micromachines toy
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The Revell model kit
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And here’s the Hasbro “Titanium Series” toy. These are small, but reasonable quality part-die-cast, part-plastic toys:
Oddly, these are painted white, while every other available depiction of the ship shows it black. Hmmm.
Starting as a kid, I found enjoyment and even a little income making models; I have a little talent in that area. But in recent years I’d started ramping back on working on models of all kinds; hobbies are less important when you’re trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage. And at the end of 2013, an attack of bronchitis truly trashed my lungs for several months; chemicals and dust seemed like *really* bad things to be around. So for going on two years now I’ve not really spent any time working on something I’ve long loved to do.
Some time back I picked up one of the Hasbro Command Shuttle toys. I was disappointed at the fixed-landing-configuration, but it seemed to me that with some effort it could be modified to show the vehicle in flight configuration. So far, there have been few clear images of the shuttle, so it’s unclear just what angle the wings are at in flight. The best bit of video so far shows the wings already in the process of folding up, so all that can be said is that the wings fold down *at* *least* this far:
So, I thought I could replicate that at some point. Never had any hard plans… like many modelers, it was one of those “one of these days I’ll get around to it” sort of things. Well… then came this last Sunday and Monday.
Sunday Raedthinn was injured and taken to the vet. Didn’t get to sleep until ridiculously late that night, and woke up relatively early, so I was a tad tired Monday. I spent the day sort of puttering around waiting to hear something, trying to be productive. But creative writing proved impossible. CAD modeling proved disastrous. CAD diagram work proceeded with some success… couldn’t draw worth a damn, but some make-work projects of scaling up some images to go on 11X17 pages proceeded well, because it required no real thought. And at some point during the first part of the day, I converted one of the Command Shuttles into flight configuration.
The weird thing: I’ve no recollection of actually doing that. Later in the day Monday I picked up Raedthinn from the vet, brought him home, took care of him for a bit and then collapsed on the couch… to find the Shuttle sitting there, completed. Nothing magical about it; it was surrounded with the tools and epoxy and such I used to make the mods, I just somehow failed to install any of the relevant memories into long-term storage. It is, I suppose, a bit of artistic creativity, but it was clearly so straightforward that I did it without putting a great deal of hard thought into it.
A little odd. But… shrug.
I’ve a few more that I’ll convert the same way, and then likely paint black. Then… probably put ’em on ebay, I suppose. Anybody interested?
Here’s a process I was previously unaware of… the use of easily available hydrogen peroxide-based consumer products and ultraviolet light (or just sunlight) to restore the original bright white color of old plastic. While the guy doing the video focuses on old computer equipment, this process might be of particular interest for old unpainted display models and the like that have turned yellow or brown due to UV exposure over the years or decades.
Something I don’t know: does this process restore the structural properties of the old plastic? With years of UV damage, not only does white plastic turn yellow, it also becomes brittle. While I really rather doubt it, I suppose it might be just barely possible that this process will reverse that embrittlement. And if it works on plastic, what else might it de-yellow? Paint? Paper? Hmmm…
Recent photos of the HL-20 lifting body spaceplane mockup on display at the Wings Over the Rockies aviation museum near Denver. An attempt at art on the photographers part, I suppose.
Some months back someone had a contractors model of the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System up on ebay. These photos might be handy if you have or are working on another Phalanx model, as one does.
The train of “OMG, the former Soviet space program looks like a zombie movie set” continues with these photos of a wooden Buran mockup. A 1/3 scale wind tunnel model, it has been left out in the elements for several decades. The elements… have not been kind.
Today I picked up four large format scans from a local print shop. All were scanned in full color at 300 DPI; the B-52 diagram was so large that I had to reduce it in size a bit – from 300 to 250 DPI – to make it work in most of my image processing programs. Still… with an original 110 inches long, scaling down a bit really isn’t much of a loss.
First: a Boeing model shop diagram of a B-52B display model at 1/40 scale. Model shop diagrams are often the best bets for clear, accurate aircraft diagrams.
Second, an old Boeing diagram of the Model 80 trimotor:
Then the USAF “supersonic escape capsule” which sure looks a lot like Fat Man:
And then a Rocketdyne diagram of the Atlas booster rocket engine:
These will likely be offered up to APR Patreon Patrons. If you want in on that, and to help out on the effort to procure these things (trust me, they’re *not* cheap!), please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
It’s a fiberglass mockup that has bounced from museum to museum. Appears likely to have been made for a movie. But *what* movie? It’s currently residing at the Russell Military Museum north of Chicago.
UPDATE: It looks like this is *probably* a product of the “American Aircraft Corporation,” a short-lived company from the 1990s. AAC released art depicting their “MP-36 Patriot” tilt rotor armed escort, which was apparently pitched to the US Marine Corps. The main vehicle in the illustration below is clearly larger than the mockup; but perhaps the mockup represents a smaller LHX-like VTOL “fighter.” Note the slightly different version in the background.
The vehicle appears to have a ducted lift-fan in the nose; this would balance out the design during hover. But it still appears that the vehicle would struggle to have decent hover performance with those relatively small rotors.
There appears to be a copy of the proposal in the University of California-Berkeley library. Anybody nearby?
The next US Spacecraft Projects was supposed to have one set of diagrams created via 3D modelling, but it’s looking like that’s not going to be the case. This one was going to be done via old-school 2D CAD, but the complexity demanded 3D. By doing so it opens up a few opportunities for other things…
