48-hour auction: X-15 Models

 aircraft, art, history, models, projects, sales & specials  No Responses »
Oct 162019
 

UPDATE: AUCTION HAS ENDED.

For sale to the highest bidder… a lot of 1/40 scale (same as the vintage Topping display model) X-15’s, mostly X-5A-3 stretched delta-winged configurations. These are solid-cast resin models that I worked on a number of years ago. From left to right:

1: An incomplete model with the Marquardt SERJ airbreathing engine

2: An incomplete X-15A-3 with upward-swept wingtip fins

3: An incomplete X-15A-3, missing fins.

4 & 5: Completed, painted and decaled X-15A-3 models

6: A vintage Topping X-15 model.One of the horizontal stabilizers had broken off, and repairs were underway.

These are, again, incomplete (except for #4&5), but a decently skilled modeler could finish the job. What you see in the photos is what you get. Except the dust. I’ll blow that off. The level of dustiness might give an indication of how long these have been sitting abandoned. Buyer also pays postage by whatever means desired. If you’d like to bid, send an email to: Bidding ends 48 hours after this is posted. There won’t be any more of these, at least not from me: the molds are not only old, they are now in a landfill.

 Posted by at 12:17 am

Possibilities of New Business Growth: Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle

 art, history, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Oct 132019
 

Continuing…

In 1985 Rockwell considered the possibility of a 150-ton payload reusable SSTO. Possible missions for it included lunar logistics, space based weaponry and solar power satellite launch. There were, however, no actual paid-for programs needing the capability enough to justify the development cost.

I vaguely recall seeing a diagram of this design somewhere, long ago. An article in “Spaceflight,” perhaps?

 

 Posted by at 8:10 pm

How much is a lot?

 blather  No Responses »
Oct 132019
 

Pop quiz, hotshots: let’s say you’re a collector of aerospace history documentation. And for reasons that seem good at the time, you start stuffing it into boxes 15 by 12 by 10 inches, averaging thirty to forty pounds per box.

How many boxes before you say, “that’s a good collection,” how many till “whoa, that’s a lot,” and how many till “you have a problem?”

 Posted by at 3:25 pm

The UK seems to be making social awkwardness illegal

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Oct 112019
 

Read this and ponder the future of the English race.

Manchester Teen Faces Sex Offender Status for Touching 17-Year-Old on the Arm, Waist

What appears to have happened is a 19-year-old tried to be friendly with a  17-year-old girl, it was misinterpreted, she *massively* over-reacted, and now she’s trying to destroy him. Even if her description of what physically happened is accurate – he walked up to her twice and touched her arm and side for a few seconds – her description of basically going into long-term emotional meltdown over it seems like either she is mentally ill or the product of a system that has gone overboard to train girls to live in perpetual fear, to assume that every male they meet is a vile, violent monster, that the most innocent touch is simple pretext for kidnapping and assault and murder.

The guy seems to be painfully shy, perhaps Aspergery. He had to look up “how to make a friend” online. A longer article is HERE. I shudder to imagine how much trouble I would have gotten in had I grown up in such a dystopian legal system.

You want “incels?” This is how you get incels. Any boy going to that girls school would be well advised to avoid her like the plague, and could hardly be blamed if they decided that PlayStation and XBox were better uses of their time than dating. And some people wonder why there’s a declining birth rate in the West.

 Posted by at 8:01 pm

National Geographic

 blather, books, history, photography, sales & specials  No Responses »
Oct 112019
 

As previously mentioned, I have a *lot* of National Geographics. I’d once hoped to have a complete collection, but now it is time for them to go. My collection is pretty complete back into the 1960’s, with scattered issues back to the 40’s. Since 2010 or so the collection is pretty scattered.

Rather than trying to sell the issues individually, I’m boxing them into lots by year. On ebay, issues from the seventies seem to be priced anywhere from a buck each to five or even more bucks each… so… call it a$12 for a years worth of Nat Geos, plus postage. A years worth of these magazines weighs about 10.5 pounds. Media mail would run $8, so $20 for a single year. Four years would fit in a larger box for $24 postage… call it $70 total for four years.

If interested in a year or more’s National Geographics, send me an email letting me know which. 

 

 Posted by at 11:20 am

Rationalizing “Primal”

 art, awesomeness, blather, science fiction  No Responses »
Oct 112019
 

As mentioned a few days ago, “Primal” is a new animated series on Adult Swim depicting the adventures of a “cave man” and his Allosaurus-like dinosaur compadre. AS is running a new episode every night this week. I’m not certain if more episodes have been made (only five seem to be acknowledged), but they damn well better make enough episodes of this to rival “The Simpsons.”

Anyway, as previously mentioned Primal stomps on scientific accuracy by having dinosaurs from all eras alongside humans (or near-humans) and mammoths and whatnot. Given that it’s a good show, I can just shrug it off and enjoy the show for what it is. But tonights episode, “Terror Under the Blood Moon,” was different. It introduced bats substantially more massive than humans and a spider the size of a sauropod that shoots web-silk from its mouth. These are creatures that not only never existed, they never *could* have existed. So… the nerd-module activated and came to a conclusion: this isn’t Earth. This isn’t the past. And it’s not just the future… it’s a specific one. It’s George R.R. Martin’s “Thousand Worlds” universe. More specifically, it’s a world that has been terraformed by Haviland Tuf and his “seedship,” the planet given genetically created critters and monsters. The seedship had, in Martins “Tuf Voyaging,” demonstrated a capability to create a range of monsters including Tyrannosaurs, along with critters from many alien worlds and beasts of wholly new designs. It would be simplicity itself for Tuf to populate a world with critters like those in “Primal.”

Will it be revealed in some future episode that the adventures of Spear and Fang are being observed from deep space by a bald fat Aspergery guy surrounded by an army of cats? Doubtful. But it’d be a hoot if it was.

 Posted by at 12:05 am
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