Protected: March 2021 Rewards Catalogs
Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, Patreon catalog
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Mar 282021
Mar 262021
In the long, long ago, Lockheed tried to sell the F-22 to the US Navy. In order to accommodate the needs of Naval aviation, the aircraft would have had to have been massively modified… most obviously by giving the aircraft variable geometry wings like the F-14’s. Clearly the Navy didn’t go for it: the cost of the program would have been immense, as would have been the risks. The F-22 ended up being troubled enough with materials and maintenance nightmares; add to that the rigors of slamming into carrier decks, constant humidity and salt air, all the other bothersome details of operating from ships at sea; and add to THAT the fact that while the NATF (Naval Advanced Tactical Fighter)*looked* like the F-22, it would have shared very few structures in common with its Air Force cousin and would have been basically a new aircraft… it would undoubtedly have been massively expensive to a degree that even the F-35 would have been hard pressed to match.
The fullrez scan of the artwork has been made available at 300 DPI to all $4/month patrons/subscribers in the 2021-03 APR Extras folder at Dropbox. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Mar 012021
APR Patrons and Subscribers today helped crowdfund the purchase of a Boeing blueprint, an inboard profile diagram of the 2707-300 SST. An overly expensive item became reasonably affordable, and will be provided to each of the funders as high resolution scans in full color (and cleaned-up grayscale).
If you’d like to be involved in helping to preserve this sort of aerospace rarity, consider singing up for the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon or the Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Feb 272021
This photo has popped up online before, but usually in pretty crummy resolution. It’s taken from “Aerojet – The Creative Company” and shows a mockup for a Titan-derived first stage booster rocket. It has double the engines of the standard Titan core stage, either two or four engines depending on how you want to count the LR-87 engines (one set of turbopumps, two combustion chambers) married to a 15-foot diameter core. This is described as a booster designed to loft the Zenith Star space-based laser weapon test system (the ZS was described and illustrated in US Spacecraft Projects #1). Documentation on this specific booster has always been somewhat lacking, though there have been quite a number of Large Diameter Core Titans designed by Aerojet and Martin over the years.
Higher rez scan in the 2021-02 APR Extras Dropbox folder for patrons/subscribers.
Protected: Crowdfund: SST
Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon
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Feb 242021
Protected: February 2021 Rewards Catalogs
Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, Patreon catalog
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Feb 242021
Jan 312021
Two pieces of (presumably McDonnell Aircraft) artwork depicting the Mercury capsule:
These were procured from eBay thanks to the contributions of Patrons and subscribers. They have been made available at 300 DPI to all $4/month patrons/subscribers in the 2021-02 APR Extras folder at Dropbox, and at 600 dpi directly to all patrons/subscribers at more than $10/month. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Protected: January 2021 Rewards Catalogs
Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon
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Jan 282021
Jan 262021
I’ve found that archives going from pure-paper to digital to be as much a curse as a blessing. Sure, the stuff that gets scanned and placed into publicly accessible archives? Great. But… often enough, archives that scan their stuff often decide that once the original is digitized they have no further use for the original… and it gets thrown away or outright destroyed. that wouldn’t be *too* bad if the scans were good. but too often they’re not. All too often the scans are *crap.* For example, some years back NASA scanned in the files of a deceased engineer. *Lots* of great stuff was scanned and made available. A lot of what the guy had were large format diagrams of hypersonic aircraft… X-24C derivatives, hypersonic research aircraft, HSTs, that sort of thing. What actually got scanned: just the data block. The on-hand scanner was good for letter size, so rather than going to the bother of scanning the large format sheet in chunks, or taking it somewhere than had a large format scanner, whoever did the scanning just scanned, essentially, the title of the thing. And then what? NASA destroyed the originals. You can see the titles, you can see perhaps a piece of a tail or a wingtip… and in all probability that’s all you will *ever* see, because they just couldn’t be bothered.
Recently the “AF FOIA Reading Room” appeared. I’ve found a *few* things of interest on it, one being a summary of the F-108 and B-70 programs. It’s reasonably well illustrated, which is a bonus. Should be great, right? Prepare to be disappointed. Here is the quality of the digitized document… 2-bit black and white at low resolution:
That’s friggen’ craptacular. 2-bit is always the mark of not-giving-a-damn, but to do that with old, clearly time-darkened paper is a crime against humanity. The only way to hope to make anything halfway decent from it is to go through it and manually clean it up. The secondary approach of letting the computer try gives results that are just plain disappointing:
It is *somewhat* clearer. But a whole lot of data is simply lost and unrecoverable, even with manual, skilled and talented cleanup. The “Enhance” button only does so much.
So if *you* have interesting aerospace diagrams and documents, *please* don’t do this. The minimum for text and diagrams is 300 dpi, grayscale, saved in a lossless format such as PNG or TIF. If the diagrams are the slightest bit faded, or if there is anything remotely colorful, scan in full color. Photos and art… full color and consider scanning at 600 or even 1200 dpi. Sure, the file sizes are way bigger. But storage space is vastly cheaper and more abundant than it was just a few years ago. And there are people, AHEM, who will scan this sort of thing for you, just to make sure it’s preserved.
Jan 102021
A few seemingly random (because they are) photos. First: a display model of an early General Dynamics concept for what would become the F-111.
And then… two photos of the Convair XB-46 in flight.
I’ve uploaded the full-rez versions of these to the APR Dropbox, into the 2021-01 APR Extras folder. This is available to any APR Patron or Subscriber at the $4 level and above.