A photo of a McDonnell Douglas X-30 NASP display model that has seen better days. Has anyone seen another copy of this model, or art depicting the same configuration? The tails on both sides are missing, so reconstruction without references would be at best speculation.
The configuration seems fairly generic. McD released a lot of art on the NASP back in the day, along with the vaguely-related “Orient Express” idea for a hypersonic transport. While the NASP and the OE were *not* the same vehicle, they were meant to at least share some similar technologies, but the aerodynamics was something that differed substantially, for example, here’s a McD Orient Express model in the National Air and Space Museum:
The two clearly come from the same line of thinking, but the NASP has a much deeper fuselage. This makes sense… going to orbit as an SSTO requires stuffing as much fuel as possible into the fuselage, and the relatively flat HST has a less efficient volumetric efficiency.