The landing boats depicted in the new 1/288 scale Orion “Battleship” model are not pure invention on my part. But sadly, neither are they reconstructed from clear blueprints. They are the result of some deduction and detection and educated reconstruction.
First off, they were described to me by one of the actual Orion engineers as being about the size of a PT boat, and seating about 20. Additionally, they were “diamond shaped,” and used an extended skid during re-entry. The diamond shape part was a bit of a head scratcher, as I could not get further clarification on exactly what that meant (there were some communication difficulties). So, I looked through the open literature from the late 50’s/very early 60’s to see if I could find something from the NACA, USAF or Convair/General Dynamics that would fit the bill. I found a few, starting with this one:
And another from the NACA that looked more promising:
I went with the latter design as the basis for the landing boat for the CAD model of the Battleship that I put together for issue V2N2 of Aerospace Projects Review (go here and buy a copy, ya mooches).
As for the re-entry shielding skid, that was confusing until I was directed to this snippet from the December 1960 issue of Flying Review:
Not much I could really do with that, though.
As so often happens, once the product is out the door, more information comes in. In this case, I was put in contact with one of the artists employed by General Atomic Back In The Day (see HERE for more discussion of the long-lost Time Of Quality Aerospace Artwork), and it happens that he illustrated the landing boat. Sadly, the art seems to have been stuffed down the memory hole… but a single photo of his desk at the time remains, and on his desk was a painting of the landing boat:
No better resolution of that photo is available. The landing boat is on the far right. The other two paintings supposedly illustrate some other aspects of the Orion program, but there’s not enough visible to make heads or tails of ’em other than they seem to be in Earth orbit. An enlargement of the landing boat:
This clearly shows a head-on view of the boat. This verifies the “diamond shape,” at least as far as the cross-section of the craft. Also visible is a raised canopy, discrete wings, tricycle landing gear and a braking chute. As it turns out, the first NACA re-entry shape I’d looked at and passed over was closer to the correct shape.
Something about the wings bothered me. At last I recalled that I had seen something very like them before… in a Convair Astronautics Division Project Apollo proposal from 1961. Keep in mind, at the time General Atomic, like Convair, was a division of General Dynamics… and the two divisions were separated by only a few miles. It’s thus quite likely that re-entry vehicle design work at Convair was fed to General Atomic. Here, an advanced Apollo system was briefly discussed that would use a lifting body for the command module, a lifting body with stowed wings that seem to be the spitting image of those shown on the landing boat painting.
And so I took the “diamond shaped” front view, the NACA RV work, and the 1961 Apollo wings, and built from them a Landing Boat.
Ta-Da…
