Reworking APR for Printing

 aircraft, APR, blather, books, drawings, history, new products, projects, rockets, spacecraft  5 Responses »
Aug 112012
 

A decade ago I wrote a bunch of issues of APR, and mailed them out as photocopies. Half a decade ago, I started completely reworking those issues to be released digitally, first on CD-ROM and then as downloads. Then a year or so ago I started making the newest re-worked issues compatible with MagCloud so that customers could purchase printed copies. But all of Volume 1 and most of Volume 2 have not been made available on MagCloud – they just weren’t formatted properly. Wrong margins and, worse, some random 11X17 pages.

When I finished with Packfile #2, German Rocketplanes, I started reworking the reworked editions of Volume 1 for MagCloud. It’s slower going than I’d like… Microsoft Word 1997 is a fine program, but one thing it kinda goes bonkers at is a large document where the fonts and margins are globally changed. Everything gets scattered hither and yon for reasons that are obscure to me. However, I’ve got the first 3 issues more or less hammered into shape. They question is: how much more hammering?

Spelling and grammar errors I fix when I see ’em. Factual errors are changed (such as V1N3, where I repeatedly and inexplicably refer to the clearly labeled Bell “SeaKat” as the “SkyKat” and sometimes “SkyCat”). But with some of the articles, new information has come my way since the original publication. Additional drawings or other imagery; improved quality versions of what I originally had. The CAD drawings I made starting in V1N2 can be improved and reformatted; a number of designs from V1N1 could have CAD drawings made of them. But should I go to the bother? Would reworking some of these things *again* be worth my time and your money?

I guess that’s the question. I don’t expect to sell but maybe a handful of MagCloudified copies of APR issues. In all the years I’ve been including my own CAD layout drawings I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a single message that said either “they add usefully to the description” or “those are a waste of space.” So: if you were on the fence about getting a MagCloud printed copy of, say V1N3, would the inclusion of a few new bits of vintage imagery push you over? Would new or revised CAD drawings do anything for you?

You know engineers, they love to change things. So I’m tempted to try to make these doubly-revised articles as complete as I can with new stuff. But that might be time and effort better spent on some other, more productive task.

Speak your piece.

 Posted by at 12:37 am

Rocket Science Is Hard

 AARRRGH, blather, news, rockets, spacecraft, youtube  5 Responses »
Aug 092012
 

Sometimes things go wrong… it’s all a part of the process. In my own experience, things blowing up is an all-too-common part of the program… IF you are actually trying to make progress.

NASA Moon Lander Prototype Explodes in Test Flight

Morpheus is an Armadillo Aerospace product… about the smallest of the small-company projects that has attained a notable level of success.

[youtube -hvlG2JtMts]

In a way, watching NASA test something and have it blow up is refreshing. “Failure is not an option” seems to have become something the NASA culture has taken to heart since… well, since Challenger. But the thing is, “success” is not “lack of failure.” You can attain a lack of failure by Not Trying. And far too often, that has seemed to be the approach: either the hard stuff was avoided, or so loaded down with bureaucracy that the effort would simply collapse under the weight of it all. That allows people to be busy without risk of failure. But it also prevents the risk of success.

 Posted by at 9:20 pm

Trimming the X-24A

 aircraft, drawings, rockets  No Responses »
Aug 092012
 

It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but if you have a supersonic aircraft it often performs better at high speeds if it’s tail end is “draggier” than it is at low speeds. This is due to the fact that as the vehicle pushes past the speed of sound, the airflow over the vehicle, or at least over its control surfaces, can get disrupted and basically turn to mush. Consequently, the tail surfaces need to be larger, or extend further out, in order to “grab” onto some proper airflow.

This seems to be especially pronounced with lifting body designs, where a fat fuselage forms a fat, widely-expanding flowfield of mush that the control surfaces need to project past. For the X-24A, this was accomplished by having large body flaps that would angle further and further out as speed increased, turning the vehicle into a “shuttlecock” configuration.

 Posted by at 10:07 am

Satellite Flares

 blather, photography, science, spacecraft, Utah  3 Responses »
Aug 082012
 

If you’re not burdened by city lights and surrounding buildings obstructing the sky, you can see satellites fly over at night. With a good camera you can catch a *lot* of satellites that you couldn’t see with the bare eye on the darkest of nights. But sometimes satellites are just incredibly bright. And sometimes they are tumbling, so that sunlight glints off of reflective solar panels and the like. Such “flares” can be very obvious.

Last night I set up my camera to take a succession of 30-second exposures, hoping to catch some Perseid meteors (spolier: I didn’t). I used the widest angle lens I have, with a fisheye attachment that’s really not very good (the stuff near the edge isn’t just distorted, it’s badly out of focus). One thing I did catch was a satellite that repeatedly flared, and quite brightly.

Note how brown the sky is. That’s one of the exciting features of having massive wildfires directly upwind a hundred miles or so. At one point today I though my house was on fire the smoke was so bad.

 Posted by at 11:29 pm
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