The line drawing took about an *hour* to process. Bleah.
UPDATE:
Oct 192012
Oct 182012
Boeing 747-400 Model Airplane with stand
(It’s possible this was done as a joke, but who can tell these days…)
Oct 172012
Not a whole lot of obvious advancement, but a lot of refinement at the small scale… landing gear, radar dishes & arms, etc.
Oct 142012
Literally years in the making, I’ve put together two versions of a photo essay of several surviving examples of the AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile. Available free for the downloading is Stagger Around #3: AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile, Abridged Edition as a 13 page PDF booklet. This contains photos of the AGM-129s on display at Hill Aerospace Museum in Utah, the USAF Museum in Dayton and the Strategic Air & Space Museum in Nebraska, ready to print.
Also available is Stagger Around #3: AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile, Full Edition. This 34-page edition includes more photos of these missiles, along with the missile at the San Diego Aerospace Museum restoration facility, a rare General Dynamics display model, official USAF photos of the AGM-129 in test and in service and drawings of the missile, including 1/32 scale layout diagrams. This is available through MagCloud, either as a downloadable PDF ($5.75) or as a professionally printed and bound edition ($11.80).
Don’t forget to check out my other MagCloud publications, including Justo Miranda’s Reichdreams Dossiers, Aerospace Projects Review, Historical Documents, and Photographing Stuff.
And don’t forget to check out Stagger Around #1, F-104A Starfighter, and Stagger Around #2, Starship Enterprise.
NOTE:
If you liked this and want to see more like it… feel free to toss fifty cents, a buck, a hundred bucks, whatever, my way. Think of it as a donation to a worthy cause. Or a bribe. Whatever you’re more comfortable with.
Oct 132012
A piece of NASA-Langley artwork describing the future of aeropropulsion… the scramjet engine. The provenance on the art is hazy at best… found in the uncatalogued collection of a former Langley engineer, it probably dates to the mid 1960’s. The aircraft illustrated here has been seen from the early 1960s up into the late 1980s, so that at best brackets the art. The aircraft has been used as a hypersonic transport and as the first stage of a space launch system. As shown here, the model used was *probably* a wind tunnel model repainted and repurposed as a display model… none of the diagrams I’ve seen of it have included the “hump” on the underside of the aft expansion ramp. Most likely that’s the connection point for the support “sting” for tunnel use. Alternatively, it *could* represent a fairing for a rather sizable rocket engine, though that seems unlikely… during scramjet operation the hump would not only mess with exhaust flowfields, it would also be subjected toa whole lot of thermal unpleasantness.
Oct 132012
Lots and lots of little bits…
Oct 062012
A Bell Helicopter concept in model form of an armed derivative of the XV-15 tiltrotor. This dated from the early/mid 1980’s and represented a ground attack aircraft… largely what the US Army was looking for in what became the LHX/RAH-66 Comanche program, just in tiltrotor form. As a tiltrotor, it would have had a much faster and more fuel efficient cruise, but a less efficient hover, than a helicopter. The Army turned out to not want tiltrotors for this application, and made sure that they were effectively excluded from the LHX competition.
Note the hand-written notation that missiles would only be fired in hover… otherwise, they would pass through the proprotor disk. However, it seems likely that missiles could be fired while the rotors were tiltedless than fully upwards, meaning that the craft could fire and move at a fair rate at the same time, just not at full speed.
Oct 042012
Got the landing platform roughed out:
UPDATE: revised the engine arrangement.
Oct 042012
Current status:
Oct 022012
1) Schematics and whatnot of the “Quinjet” from the “Avengers” movie. I’m discussing building a CAD model of this for Fantastic Plastic, but diagrams are unavailable. Screenshots galore will be available, but I could really use accurate diagrams.
2) The same for the “Avengers” helicarrier.
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3) Either a scan of this, or at least pointers to when and where it was published (apparently sometime prior to October, 1944):
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4) Better/more detailed diagrams & illustrations – and original source documentation – of this early 1980’s concept by Martin Marietta for a “Phase II” restoration of the Iowa class battleships into battlecarriers by replacing the aft turret with a hangar, ski-jumps for Harriers and VLS missiles, for a conversion kit:
