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.
Oct 112015
Sep 292015
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.
Sep 142015
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.
Wooden Shuttle: Rotting Wind Tunnel Model from the Abandoned Buran Space Programme
Aug 272015
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.
Aug 252015
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?
Aug 042015
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…
Jul 272015
“Hot Toys” is a manufacturer of high-end (highly detailed, expertly sculpted, terribly expensive) figures and vehicles… superheroes, Star Wars characters, etc. They have recently revealed a Toy o the Millenium Falcon that nobody is quite sure if they are actually going to produce in any numbers and sell… a 1/6 scale version. At that scale, the toy is 18 *FEET* long, 12 feet across. Given that their 1/6 scale figures sell for hundreds of dollars each, I can only imagine that this Falcon toy would run you multiples of tens of thousands of dollars.
I’ll stand by my mailbox in case anyone wants to send me one.
“Star Wars Galaxy Exhibition Powered by Hot Toys” Kick Off
Jul 252015
I have added three hi-rez scans to the APR Patreon “Extras” Dropbox folder for the month of 2015-07. If you are interested in these, they are available to all $4 and up patrons at the APR Patreon.
Bell artwork from the late 70’s or ’80’s depicting the D316 tiltrotor, a proposed operational derivative of their XV-15 research tiltrotor.
Convair 58-9 SST, derived from the B-58 bomber (see HERE for a well illustrated article on this and other B-58 SSTs):
Early artwork for a VTOL fighter concept from Ryan; this would eventually become the X-13:
Jul 232015
I saw this in a store a few days ago. It made me laugh and go “ugh” simultaneously.
If you were offended by the Confederate Losers Flag, what would be the chances you’d be interested in buying any “Dukes” merchandise in the first place? If you weren’t offended, would this censorship increase you interest in the product?
It appears that this isn’t just an issue of the box art; a flag decal isn’t included with the kit.
Jun 292015
