Unsolved Mystery: 1946 USAAF Supersonic Escape Capsules

 aircraft, APR, awesomeness, blather, cyanotype blueprints, drawings, eBay, history, Hmm..., models, news, nukes, Patreon, projects, rockets  13 Responses »
Oct 142014
 

Not long ago, I was alerted to a pair of eBay auctions for vintage blueprints of “Supersonic Escape Capsules.” The blueprints, produced by the US Army Air Forces, depict models of the capsules made from plexiglas and plywood. This would be generally interesting to me, but one of the diagrams seemed to indicate that the diagrams might not be what they said they were. Instead, it looked a *lot* like an aerodynamically improved “Fat Man” atom bomb. I suspected that what was for sale were actually test or display models of early atom bomb casings, intentionally mis-described for security reasons. I managed to score both blueprints with surprisingly minimal fuss.

Upon receipt of the blueprints, my suspicion that at least one of them depicts an evolved Fat Man seems to have been misplaced. Fat Man was about 60 inches in diameter; the model is 38.5 inches in diameter, which would make for an odd scale. But the idea of a supersonic escape capsule being studied in 1946 is also odd, since the USAAF was years from having supersonic aircraft. And the configurations don’t really seem to work as escape capsules; typically such things are the entire cockpit which can break away from the aircraft, but these would make for very unfortunate cockpits for supersonic aircraft. So at the current time I can’t quite figure this one out. I’ll continue to see if I can run down info on this, but leads are few.

I have not scanned in these blueprints yet. They’ve been folded up longer than most of the people reading this have been alive, so it’ll take a good long time to flatten them out and make them safe for scanning. But I’ve taken some photos, which I’ve made available in full rez in a ZIP archive for all of my APR Patreon patrons. The APR Patreon page is HERE. If you want to help preserve and make available obscure aerospace history items such as these, please consider contributing to the APR Patreon. For as little as $0.75/month, you can help out, plus gain access to a bunch of aerospace “rewards” like these. You can also help out by helping to spread the word.

escapecapsule1

The first “escape capsule” on a quite good vintage blueprint. The resemblance to “Fat Man” is obvious… but likely dubious. It’s a close match to the Davy Crockett warhead from a decade later.

escapecapsule3

The second “escape capsule,” on a larger and more badly faded blueprint.

escapecapsule2

One of the problems with photographing large format blueprints is the almost inevitable groupies. Cats like paper. Cats *love* crinkly paper. And 70-year-old vellum blueprints are the crinkliest of crinkly paper. Fortunately, no damage done.

 Posted by at 12:50 pm

Rich people problems

 blather, dumbassery  3 Responses »
Oct 142014
 

There are some problems that can really only happen to the rich, because it takes buckets of money to buy the stuff needed to get into the trouble. Take this, for instance:

In Ocean Hammock, dream house, ocean view, wrong lot

In short: some folks bought a $160,000 lot, then paid builders $680,000 to build them a “dream home” on it. But the builders built the house on the *next* *door* lot. Ooops.

OK, this is clearly a problem, and the builders have themselves a hell of a headache since they followed flawed surveying. While this could in principle happen to low-funds-folks, there are some details which make it really unlikely, even at a far lower dollar value. For instance, if middle class people were involved, the builders might still make the same mistake, but there would be people who’d figure it out pretty quick. Those paying for the house would notice the first time they came by and found the work being done at the wrong site… for most people, lots are pretty small and well-defined, which would make surveying screwups of this magnitude unlikely. And those who owned the wrong property would notice someone building a house on it. But here, the builders finished the house, and the owners didn’t know it was on the wrong spot… for *six* *months.* Why? Because this is a vacation house, and only one of eighteen lots that the homeowners own.

It must be nice to be so rich that you can invest nearly a million bucks in a house and completely blow it off for the better part of a year.

It’s going to be a serious problem for a lot of people, especially the surveyors, when the lawyers inevitably get involve. The builders are trying to get the two lot owners together to reach an agreeable compromise, and are hoping to avoid to avoid lawyers… a triumph of desperate hope over reality. But as someone who can never dream to have a “dream home” like this, especially not as a secondary vacation house for renting out purposes… well, I just can’t empathize.

 Posted by at 10:02 am

NY Comic_Con 2014 Cosplayers

 art, awesomeness, blather, humor, photography  No Responses »
Oct 132014
 

Whenever there’s a comic book, fantasy or sci-fi convention, you’ll find a whole lot of people who show up in costumes. Some of these people are effectively professionals; others are talentless schmoes just trying to have fun. At first glance the idea seems profoundly silly nerdness… then you think of the sports equivalent, fans of football, baseball, whatever who dress up in team jerseys, paint their faces, etc.

So… whatever floats yer boat, I suppose.

That said, a few of these costumes are *amazing.* The “Every Johnny Depp” is incredibly clever, well conceived and just plain awesome. The exoskeleton suit from “Edge of Tomorrow” looks like it was a whole lot of work,  but the end result looks really good. And who would have expected an Auntie Entity?

The Very Best Cosplay From New York Comic-Con 2014

There aren’t many featured here, but there are a few black folk in some entertaining costumes. Forget major government feel-good programs… racism in the country will really only end when all nerds can come together in peace and harmony.

 Posted by at 4:51 pm

Patreon bonus: “The colonization of space”

 blather, history, new products, news, Patreon, projects, spacecraft  3 Responses »
Oct 132014
 

While my right arm theoretically heals up (I hopped a ride to the doc at o’dark thirty this AM, waited around for an hour till they showed up, got an X-Ray and a jab right in the damage with a shot of cortisone and pain reliever, and the tentative diagnosis is simple tendonitis, though there may be a bone spur that’ll need to be Dremel’ed off), my ability to do CAD drafting is seriously compromised. Still trying to make some progress, and I hope to have something to show later today.

So rather than just sit around and do nothing, I’m sitting around and doing scanning. One of these decades I’d like to have scanned in everything I have, which would be  a neat trick, but every little bit helps. Some things are just photocopies of journal articles and the like. One was something I’d been looking for for a while, and couldn’t find when actively searching for it (but which turned up when searching for something else), Gerard K. O’Neill’s 1974 Physics Today article on space colonization via vast rotating cylinders. hat has now been scanned in an uploaded to the APR Patreon “creations” section, as a downloadable bonus for all APR Patrons.

I’ve a bunch more things like this that I plan on posting  for APR Patreon patrons of various levels. These are all, of course, in addition to the promised “rewards.” All the “creations” get wiped out at the end of each monthly billing cycle, so if you’d like to get in, time’s a-wastin’…

 Posted by at 1:35 pm

Buddies

 cats  4 Responses »
Oct 122014
 

Buttons and Speedbump chilling out on the couch last night. After a day of beatign the tar out of each other, they take the time out to relax.

WP_20141011_021 WP_20141011_013 WP_20141011_007 WP_20141011_003 WP_20141011_001

Note: Taking photos with your non-dominant hand is more challenging than you might think.

 Posted by at 8:21 pm

Space Shuttle Enterprise visits Vandenberg

 aircraft, awesomeness, history, photography, rockets, spacecraft  5 Responses »
Oct 122014
 

A page with some good photos showing the Enterprise on an ET with SRBs stacked up at the Slick Six western launch site:

1985: Space Shutle at Vandenberg

Whether it would’ve made good sense to fly the Shuttle from California can be debated… but undeniable, I think, is the view that it would have been a damn fine show.

Had Challenger not gone FOOM in ’86, the SLC-6 site *might* have been used for Shuttle launches to high inclination orbits. This, presumably, would ahve opened the door for the Shuttle to be more useful. *Perhaps* it would ahve led to a better system. With launch and recovery processing done by the USAF rather than NASA, *maybe* Vandenberg would have been able to fly Shuttle for much cheaper, more reliably and more often than NASA in Florida. Maybe.

 Posted by at 11:01 am

Who wants a window?

 awesomeness, history, news, nukes  7 Responses »
Oct 112014
 

Bonhams, the high-end auction house, is auctioning off a single pane of glass. Doesn’t sound like much, until you get the details. It’s 54 inches long by 36 inches high, six inches thick and weighs 1,500 pounds. It is composed of 70% lead oxide; this makes it structurally sucko… but it also makes it a good blocker of radiation. Which is the point: this window oversaw plutonium production for the Manhattan Project at the Hanford facility in Washington state.

MANHATTAN PROJECT VIEWING WINDOW

 Posted by at 10:57 pm

I guessed wrong that it’d be a relaxing weekend at home

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah.  8 Responses »
Oct 112014
 

Well, crap. My plans, developed yesterday after my car died and got left at the shop, was that I’d spend this weekend working on CAD drafting and modeling. But a small issue has arisen what stomped on those plans.

Starting a few weeks ago, I developed a recurring pain in my right shoulder. Some days it was there, some days not. At it’s worst, it would prevent me from raising the arm very far, but that mostly inconvenienced thing like raising items over my head. Didn’t interfere with the computer or driving. Yesterday it was fine.

This morning I awoke to agony. I have been unable to raise the arm at all, except for straight out to the side (which is not terribly useful for most common applications). The right hand and elbow function, but the shoulder? It hurts hanging straight down; it screams in any other position. The end result is that I can position this little netbook so I can type and post my gibberish, but proper manipulation of a mouse has proved impossible so far, stymieing my plans to get some damned work done.

Like as not, tomorrow (Sunday) my shoulder will be more or less fine. But it’s also possible that the pain will be worse, and then there’s Monday when I still won’t have my car.

A few years back I had tennis elbow; this feels much like that, except on a grander scale. Choking down as much aspirin and ibuprofin as I feel comfortable with has not noticeably knocked down the pain, nor slathering on stuff like Ben Gay or Voltaren. The tennis elbow took more than a year to fade away, but there was one treatment that resulted in pretty substantial pain reduction: jamming a big-ass needle into the joint and pumping it full of steroids. If the same sort of issue is the problem here… I shudder to imagine what sort of icepick of a hypodermic would be called for. Bleah.

 Posted by at 10:24 pm
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