A few nights back Raedthinn was slacking near Buttons, when Buttons decided that the thing to do was reach out and put a paw on Raedthinns back. Buttons didn’t do anything more than this… just reached out to touch Raedthinn. Raedthinn didn’t much care for it, but didn’t really do anything about it for a few seconds. Then he simply got up and left.
A mid-1945 detailed diagram of what would become the Bell X-1 (see Air Drawing 58 HERE for the full thing) produced this complex title block:
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When it comes to suborbital space tourism, Virgin Galactic/SpaceShip Two gets all the press. But XCOR Aerospace and their Lynx spaceplane seems to be making good progress as well. And they just got some sales:
Tickets – 305 of them – costing $96,000 (about half of the SS2 ticket price) were sold.
Neat.
Here’s another one of those “I was sure I’d posted it before, but now can’t seem to find it” items…
A 1948 promo video by Northrop showing a mockup of a passenger compartment to be built into a B-49-style flying wing. Very spacious, and with one heck of a view to the front and rear, but of course none to the side. The idea of flying wing airliners keeps popping up, but also keeps never happening. There are several decent reasons for this:
1) It’s more difficult to pressurize the non-cylindrical passenger compartment, meaning that it’ll weigh more (and thus negate some of the weight savings of using a flying wing)
2) Configurations like this won’t fit quite so conveniently at most airports. The jetways will have a hard time mating up.
3) Most of the passengers won’t have any sort of view at all, it’d be like flying in a cargo container.
4) The further a passenger is left or right from the centerline, the more disconcerting and uncomfortable rolling maneuvers will be for them.
5) It’s different. The Dash-80 (the prototype for what became the KC-135 and 707) set the basic configuration for the modern jetliner in 1954… 60 years ago. The most modern jetliners don’t really look any different. And like it or not, “convention” matters.
Northrop drawings of this jetliner are HERE.
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I’ve slapped together a Patreon “campaign,” but I have not yet launched it. However, I’ve stitched together the screenshots of the thing, shown below, listing the “milestones” and the “rewards” I’m considering. In short, I have a fairly good sized library of stuff I’m fairly certain would appeal to a fair number of folks, and this would be a way to get it all scanned and cleaned and posted and whatnot. The way this works, the more an individual contributes, the higher the quality of product they’ll get, and the more the total contributions, the faster the rate stuff will be put out there. The specifics might change, but I think this is a proper sort of setup.
If you have a suggestion or any sort of comment at all, feel free. Advertising, marketing, all that stuff… not my area. So if you see something stupid, or something that could be better, let me know.
Somewhere over a year ago, I was contacted by someone making some period-accurate blueprints (I forget the exact project, though), meant to replicate the look of something from the American aerospace industry in the 1940’s-50’s. I gathered together a bunch of my scanned blueprints from the era and put together a collection of the title blocks. These are the small grids often visible in the lower righthand corner of blueprints that give all the pertinent info about the drawing. The title blocks not only vary considerably from company to company, but from year to year, division to division, even from one drawing to the next and one draftsman to the next. Sometimes the title blocks were drawn in by the draftsman, sometimes they were printed in advance on the drafting paper, sometimes they were pre-printed “stickers.”
Because someone else might have use for ’em… here ya go, the first of the bunch. This is from a 1944 Bell Aircraft layout diagram of the Model 40 jet fighter, which became the XP-83 (the whole diagram is available as Air Drawing 59 HERE).
Buttons, Speedbump, Raedthinn and Fingers in a rare moment of non-chaos.
A better camera than my smart phone would have done a better job here at lighting up the critters compared to the background, but I think the effect is kinda neat. And only very slightly creepy.
APR issue V3N4 is done, at 128 pages. The V3N4 Addendum is done, at 49 (11X17) pages. All that’s left now is uploading and reworking the webpages and posting them as available. I *was* going to say something like “I think they might be available tomorrow,” with “tomorrow” meaning Sunday, but I see that it is in fact already 4AM tomorrow morning. Earth, with its stupid 24 hour rotational period… it really needs to get in synch with my 25 hour circadian rhythm.
And here we have a dumbass who thinks that if evolution is real, rape is ok:
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I know that some people *believe* because they truly feel it. And some people use their belief to make their lives, and the lives of others, better. But then there are freaks like this. I don’t know if he truly believes in God or not; but if he does I kinda hope he continues to, because if he truly believes what he says, then he’s a hairs-breadth from a killing spree and fear of eternal damnation is the only thing holding him back.
On the other hand, if he’s a true believer, I really hope he doesn’t spend much time reading the Old Testament. It’ll give him ideas he shouldn’t have. Like, say… Judges 5:30, and Judges 21:10-24, and Numbers 31:7-18, and Deuteronomy 20:10-14, and Deuteronomy 21:10-14, and Deuteronomy 22:28-29, and Exodus 21:7-11, and Zechariah 14:1-2, and…
