Currently on eBay is a truly impressive piece:
The Buy-It-Now price is a substantial fifteen grand. It shows the internal structure of the Douglas proposal of the CX-HLS, what became the C-5, at fairly large scale. More pics after the break.
Currently winging their way from Ukraine to yours truly are two vintage brochures on the Antonov 225. These were picked up on ebay, purchases made possible by patrons of the APR Patreon. These brochures will in due course end up on the APR Patreon catalog, to be voted for as possible monthly rewards for the patrons.
If you’re interested in helping to preserve this sort of aerospace artifact, and also interested in getting high-rez scans of them, consider signing on to the APR Patreon.
The L-2000 was Lockheed’s entrance into the mid-1960’s FAA contest to design and develop an American supersonic transport. The FAA wanted the US to have an SST substantially better than the Anglo-French Concorde, with up to 250 passengers and a cruise speed of up to Mach 3 (as fast as an SR-71). Interestingly, the Concorde was not expected to be a long0lived design, but rather was simply going to be the *first* SST, a technology demonstrator, a diplomatic endeavor between historic enemies Britain and France, a flying sales brochure for Angle-French industry. And the Tupolev Tu 144 was an attempt to put something, *anything*, into the air first.
In the end, the FAA selected the Boeing 2707 design, ending the L-2000. And after great promise was shown, politics killed the Boeing 2707, ending substantial forward progress in civil aviation. Since then, air flight has gotten cheaper and more efficient, but it has not gotten any faster… and it certainly hasn’t become more comfortable.
This artwork depicts the final or near-final L-2000 concept, a double-delta configuration vaguely like a larger Concorde in shape. The Boeing design started off as a swing-wing configuration but became a fixed, tailed design prior to cancellation.
I’ve uploaded the full rez scans to the 2018-01 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to all current APR Patrons at the $4 level and above. If you are interested in this and a great many other “extras” and monthly aerospace history rewards, please sign up for the APR Patreon. Chances are good that $4/month is far cheaper than your espresso/booze budget!
I’ve put five of my large format cyanotypes on ebay, with starting bids far lower than the usual selling price.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Space-Launch-System-1-72-scale-Diagram-Cyanotype-Blueprint/253278318585
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Large-Cyanotype-Blueprint-of-the-Consolidated-B-36-Bomber/253278304259
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lockheed-Skunk-Works-hypersonic-X-24C-L301-cyanotype-blueprint/253278262083
Got them done a little early this time, so here’s a review of what the APR Patrons will be receiving:
Patrons will receive:
A proposal brochure on the C-135A cargo transport
A brochure about the Shuttle-C
A well illustrated NASA-produced booklet from the mid 1980’s describing the space station as them conceived
A large format diagram showing a wind tunnel model of the Titan III/Dyna Soar
A CAD diagram of the ca. 2001 Russian TsAGI Integrated Wing Body large passenger transport jetliner
If these are of interest, please consider signing on to the APR Patreon.
Currently being sold on eBay is a 4″x5″ transparency showing a Lockheed Skunk Works VTOL concept. I seem to recall this concept showing up in Av Week long ago… the 1990’s?
Every month, patrons of the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon campaign are rewarded with a bundle of documents and diagrams, items of interest and importance to aerospace history. If you sign up, you get the monthly rewards going forwards; the “back issues” catalog lets patrons aid the APR cause by picking up items from before they signed on. The catalog, available to all patrons at the APR Patreon, has been updated to include everything from the beginning of the project back in 2014 on up to February, 2017.
Below are the items from 2016 (and the first two months of 2017):
If you are interested in any of these and in helping to fund the mission of Aerospace Projects Review, drop by the APR Patreon page and sign up. For only a few bucks a month you can help fund the procurement, scanning and dissemination of interesting aerospace documentation that might otherwise vanish from the public.
From the very early 1960’s, this piece of Hughes artwork depicts a hot-cycle “Helibus.” The “hot-cycle” was a briefly studied form of helicopter that did not mechanically drive the rotor, but instead ducted hot exhaust gas from a turbojet up into the rotor hub and then down through ducts in the rotors, exhausting out nozzles near the tips of the rotors. The exhaust gas would then push the rotor blades directly. The advantage was that since there was no direct mechanical linkage between the rotors and the fuselage, the torque that a helicopter normally needs to counter with a tail rotor would be largely eliminated. Thus this “Helibus” has no tail rotor, but it would still need to have some sort of reaction control thrusters at the tail to provide directional control at low speed.
Note that every row of passenger seats has its own door. This would greatly facilitate passenger loading and unloading, at some considerable weight and cost penalty. it would also firmly lock in seat pitch… as the engines are swapped out for newer, better, lighter, more powerful and less fuel hungry versions, the airlines drive would be, as we’ve seen, to pack more and more passengers onboard. But here the doors on the side have to precisely match the seat rows.
A vehicle like this would probably be used mostly to transport office drones from rooftop heliports in urban city centers to transport hubs out in the burbs or the sticks.
Now available: two new US Aerospace Projects issues:
US Transport Projects #07 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #07 includes:
USTP #07 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
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Also available, the first in a new series:
US Recon & Research Projects #01 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #01 includes:
USRP #01 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
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So very, very close on the next two US Aerospace Projects issues. I’m only lacking cover “art”and have to deal with a bit of “dead air” in the middle of US Transport Projects #7. Usually I can shuffle things around well enough to not have this sort of thing, but this time it just hasn’t worked out. I suppose it doesn’t really matter all that much, but it does look kinda lazy like that.
It’s been about a year since I released the last USxP issue. That last issue was the first time where I used vector diagrams embedded within the issue, rather than raster images; getting the diagrams from AutoCAD into Word was a bit of a chore back then. And in the intervening months… I forgot how I did it. So I had to figure it out again, and the process is different. I have to walk the AutoCAD diagram through Rhino 3D and save as a WMF and blah, blah, blah; end result is it works just fine. I’ve done some further refinement… the main outlines are set at 0.25 mm width and the ends of the lines have been reset to rounded and mitered, so sharp corners now look more like sharp corners.
Hoping to have these two out in a day or two. The other three will be rather longer.
