November 2009 – Page 12 – The Unwanted Blog

I have ~~three~~ ~~two~~ ~~one~~ no remaining prints of the Pluto poster from last summer. These ~~three~~ ~~two~~ one are slightly darker than they were supposed to be, which is why they are the last three. However, given that the artist will be unable to finish the “second edition” artwork in the foreseeable future, these are the last Pluto posters for the foreseeable future. ~~If you would like one, two~~ ~~or all three of them, send an email here:~~

~~Price is $25 each, plus $4 shipping within the US~~ ~~($4 total, regardless of how many you order). Overseas shipping, $6~~.

Finally get to use words that I don’t think I’ve ever used: SOLD OUT.

Recently arrived in my mailbox was Paul Suhler’s new book, “From RAINBOW to GUSTO: Stealth and the Design of the Lockheed Blackbird.” There have been over the years a great many books on the SR-71 and its development, but this is the first to make a serious stab at a comprehensive history of the designs leading up to the final A-12 “Blackbird” design.
This book describes advanced, semi-stealthy derivatives of the U-2, including the “GUSTO Mark 2,” which used a twin-boom design and relocated the inlet to the top of the fuselage; the Navy’s Project CHAMPION “Ramjet Kite” designs which included a large subsonic tow plane hauling what certainly look like vast inflatable-wing kites with giant ramjet engines; and moves on to describe the Archangel series of supersonic designs produced by Kelly Johnson’s team at the Skunk Works, as well as the FISH and Kingfish competitors designed by Convair. And this time, rather than a simple text description of these interesting designs, “RAINBOW to GUSTO” actually provides three-view drawings of the great majority of them. A quick count shows about 42 layout drawings… including one of the D-33 design, a manned A-12 follow-on vehicle meant for takeoff from small runways (including aircraft carriers), featuring a Concorde-like planform and an RL-10 booster rocket. There are also never-before-published photos of the desk models of FISH and of several Kingfish variants.

More than just a series of design studies, the book is also the story of the people involved and is based on interviews with stealth researchers and aircraft designers and on hundreds of declassified documents. It has the first public telling of why Convair was brought in to compete with Lockheed, why the B-58B was cancelled by the Air Force, who discovered the flying saucer shape, and why Lockheed didn’t build it.

While I have not yet completely read the book (man, I’m slow), it is a great little book. And that is the one complaint I have about it: it has a relatively small format, 9 by 6 inches. As a result of this, the layout drawings are necessarily reproduced very small. However, I have contacted the author, and we have worked out something of a fix for this: I will be showing many of the drawings from the book here on this very blog, at much higher rez than in the book. But if you want to know the details of the design – history, context, performance, etc. – well, you’ll just have to buy the book. Something I heartily recommend that you do.

Due to Lockheed copyright restrictions, the original drawings cannot be reproduced except within the pages of Mr. Suhler’s book. However, I’ve gotten the go-ahead to re-draw them. The first drawing out the hatch is the Archagel 1 (A-1), figure 46, page 98. This particular drawing has a Source Grade of four:

I will be creating these drawings at a leisurely pace… one every day or three. Combine these drawings and “RAINBOW to GUSTO,” and you will have a wonderful history of the SR-71 development, just the thing for project-heads!
“RAINBOW to GUSTO” is available from Amazon.com (for $39.95) and direct from the AIAA ($29.95 for AIAA members).

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UPDATE: To download the high-rez version of the A-1 drawing, simply click THIS LINK. You will be prompted for a username and a password. For the A-1 drawing, use these:

Username: the first word in the body of the text on page 98
Password: the first word in the body of the text on page 99
The high-rez drawings will include further information. Data that’s on the drawings but not in the text of the book – dimensions, wing area, etc. – will be included on the drawings. But the only way to get the high-rez drawings is… to get a copy of the book.

Yeah, this’ll be a blockbuster:
From the Guardian:

Producer Barrie Osborne cast Keanu Reeves as the messiah in The Matrix and helped defeat the dark lord Sauron in his record-breaking Lord of the Rings trilogy. Now the Oscar-winning American film-maker is set to embark on his most perilous quest to date: making a big-screen biopic of the prophet Muhammad.

Budgeted at around $150m (£91.5m), the film will chart Muhammad’s life and examine his teachings. Osborne told Reuters that he envisages it as “an international epic production aimed at bridging cultures. The film will educate people about the true meaning of Islam”.

<> Osborne’s production will reportedly feature English-speaking Muslim actors. It is backed by the Qatar-based production company Alnoor Holdings, who have installed the Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to oversee all aspects of the shoot. In accordance with Islamic law, the prophet will not actually be depicted on screen.
<>

Well, that’s a bore.

Now available is a Consolidated-Vultee diagram for a B-36 display model. The diagrams shows the shapes and contours of all major componants, and is of “no scale” (meaning the drawing was not meant to be used for only a single scale, but was to be enlarged as appropriate). The drawing was scanned in pieces and painstakingly re-assembled digitally.

The drawing is in full color and is 7566X4126 pixels, and comes with a half-size version for easier viewing and printing… as well as cleaned-up grayscale versions.

The B-36 display model drawing can be downloaded for $5.50.

I went back to the Bingham Canyon Mine a day or two back to take some photos with the new camera. But instead of getting there early, I got there in the late afternoon, and conditions for photography *sucked.* Very hazy, and the sun was almost straight into the lens. Oh, well. But below is a vertical strip from the bottom of the hole to the top. It should help give some indication of the size of the thing.

Keeping an eye on things in the mountains of Colorado…

On display at the Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles in Lexington, Nebraska, is an M-113 with a difference. It packs a total of 8 Hellfire laser-designated fire-and-forget missiles. Never entered service, and it looks like one good hit up top by enemy fire could really ruin the crews day, but it’s still a serious nasty looking piece of equipment.

In the 1970’s, General Dynamics started designing a Supersonic Cruise And Maneuvering Prototype. This eventually became the F-16XL, which replaced the F-16’s conventional wing and horizontal tail surfaces with a new cranked delta wing. But this early design iteration, from about 1978 or before, shows a much more modified design, with a very different cranked delta wing and exhaust vectorable in the pitch axis. Also shown is a weapons load of two largish air-to-air-looking missiles underneath and two very small wingtip missiles of some kind. The F-16’s nose has also been extended.

Recently a reader used the Donate feature to “subscribe” to the Unwanted Blog (to the tune of $50). Obviously, since the UB is publicly available to anyone with an internet connection and no hyperactive net-nanny filters, subscribing is not even remotely a requirement. Still, since “amateur aerospace historian/extremely amateur photog/snark expert” is not exactly a high-profit career, any “subscriptions” would of course be appreciated.

And unless business picks up here real soon like, I’m’a gonna have to go down to the McDonald’s and hire on to sling fries. And then I won’t have time to post to the UB. And that would make this puppy sad:

You wouldn’t want *that,* would you?

A photo from the Jay Miller archive showing the XB-36 in flight, in full color (with what looks like maybe some extra color courtesy fading or some such).

I have a half dozen other rare color B-36 shots, if people are interested. Hard to tell… commenting seems to have ground to a halt.