Dyna Soar Meets Mercury

 aircraft, models, projects, spacecraft  5 Responses »
Jul 262008
 

In 1959 Boeing briefly studied using the Mercury capsule or a derivative as the cockpit of the Dyna Soar. At the time, the cockpit of the Dyna Soar was intended to be ejectable in the event of an emergency, in a manner similar to the cockpit of the F-111. However, unlike the F-111 cockpit capsule, the Dyna Soar ccokpit was meant to be capable of suriving re-entry. The use of a Mercury capsule would give the Dyna Soar a cockpit with verified ability to survive re-entry… with, of course, some major concessions regarding vehicle shape, weight and growth potential.

Drawings soon.

image2a.jpg

 Posted by at 1:11 am

Early Boeing Dyna Soar booster

 aircraft, models, projects, spacecraft  3 Responses »
Jul 202008
 

A photo from the Boeing archives showing a booster for their first Dyna Soar proposal. With a lifting vehicle on the front of the booster, some serious pitch control would be needed (to overcome the lift generated by the spaceplanes wings), but I think this was just a tad excessive…

image16.jpg

 Posted by at 4:49 pm

Rhino day 4

 aircraft, models, projects  No Responses »
Jul 202008
 

Now with canopy, inlet and exhaust. The exhaust is a whole lot of guesswork… the available drawings just don’t show it very well. The inlet is seriously flawed…. but it’s the sort of flaw that could be fixed in ten minutes with a file and sandpaper. And yes, the canopy is not symetrical. The window on the starboard side went down further.
image1c.jpg  image2c.jpg  image3c.jpg

 Posted by at 4:45 pm

Rhino day three

 aircraft, models, projects  No Responses »
Jul 192008
 

Third day of tinkering with Rhino 3D and the Rockwell Stealth has seen some major improvement to the forward fuselage outer mold lines. Still not perfect, but for the moment good enough. This is now a fully-solid model… so it’s on to making the details.

image4b.jpg image5b.jpgimage6b.jpg

 Posted by at 8:28 pm

Vought ADAM

 aircraft, models, projects  2 Responses »
Jul 192008
 

A photograph taken in the 1960’s showing a Vought ADAM (Air Deflection and Modulation) VTOL fighter concept display model. ADAM used engines in the wings with thrust deflection to achieve VTOL performance.

Scan made from a slide. No further information on this particular design concept.

adam.jpg

 Posted by at 11:53 am

Rhino day 2

 aircraft, models, projects  No Responses »
Jul 182008
 

Further progress on the stealthy aircraft being modelled in Rhino. The forward fuselage is packed with complex curves, and there’ve clearly been some issues in modeling them… still, it’s looking like what it’s supposed to.

rhino3a.jpg  rhino4a.jpg  rhino5a.jpg  rhino6a.jpg  

 Posted by at 5:32 pm

Rhino 3-D modeling

 aircraft, blather, models  2 Responses »
Jul 172008
 

As the Space Park effort showed, I’m reasonably good at modeling in CAD. However  the CAD program I use has some serious limitations as far as the sort of shapes it can model as solid objects…. anything with organic contours is pretty much right out. But Rhino 3D is advertised as being the solution to that. So some while back I bought a copy and promptly ignored it. However, I’ve fired it up, and here’s the first project: an early 1970’s North American Rockwell stealthy ground attack plane.  This is just a first stab at a model and is pretty wrong in some ways; much left to do. Still, at the very least it didn’t explode, so that’s something.

rhino5.jpg  rhino7.jpgrhino6.jpg  rhino8.jpg

 Posted by at 10:13 pm

Wooo. Space Park modeling is done.

 models, science fiction, spacecraft  2 Responses »
Jul 162008
 

Finally wrapped up the Space Park tonight. Numerous hours were spent in re-building a few things… one advantage that physical modeling has over virtual is that the part doesn’t suddenly start spitting error messages at you. Nevertheless, the problems were solved and the model completed. Shown here are the parts breakdown as well as the parts layout for stereolithography. Now to get quotes…

spaceparkparts2a.jpg spaceparkparts1a.jpg spaceparkpartssprue2aa.jpg  spaceparkpartssprue2ba.jpg

spaceparkpartssprue2ca.jpg   spaceparkpartssprue2da.jpg

Irritatingly, the blog software won’t make thumbnails of all of the images… too big, I guess. So click on the titles to see ’em.

 Posted by at 12:48 am
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