Coming soonish: the return of USXP publications. Five are under current development and are mostly done. There is a new title in the bunch… USRP. Strictly speaking it should probably be USR&RP… United States Research and Recon Projects. Perhaps Recon and Research aren’t necessarily the most obvious categories to link together into a single title, but apart from the vitally important alliteration, there is this important fact: compared to, say, Bombers, there aren’t that many Recon and Research projects out there.
If there are specific proposals, or general categories you’d like to see in future publications, feel free to comment below.
Bell has unveiled a very sci-fi mockup of a “concept helicopter.” It features some unusual things:
A hybrid propulsion system
Variable geometry rotor tips
Lots and lots of glass
Only a single pilots seat
No physical control.
It’s that last one that’ll probably cause the most consternation. The pilot is meant to wear augmented reality goggles/visor/glasses/whatever; this will place data screens in front of him in an arrangement the pilot prefers. Control will still be manual, but the choppers onboard AI will presumably be able to track the pilots hands as he manipulates phantom controls.
Sure, it sounds cool, but two issues immediately present themselves:
1: Computer goes goofy. Malware, hacking, power surge, EMP, whatever… this thing seems like a deathtrap if the computer goes down.
2: Phantom controls that exist solely in the computers imagination and the pilots visor… sure, that sounds cool, and is certainly a common enough trope in sci-fi. Witness anytime Tony Stark wants to design anything, for instance. But in reality, your hands and arms get tired. You actually rest on the steering wheel or the yoke or the collective. Additionally, pilots really like to get direct feedback, which seems as yet beyond the ability to reproduce virtually. More, with every bump or jolt, the pilots hands will flail around. In a conventional helicopter, the pilots hands will be constrained by the controls they are gripping. In this one… nothing.
I would suggest a compromise: a set of *basic* physical instruments. Just what the pilot needs to safely fly the chopper. And I’d damn sure stick with physical controls. But… keep the augmented reality for the *secondary* instruments. Navigation, radio, air conditioning, whisper mode, thermal vision, fire rearward missiles… that can be via virtual reality. Instrument panels that are called up with a voice command, and recede when not in use.
I have posted in the 2017-03 APR Extras Dropbox folder for APR Patrons a small pile of aerospace history images yoinked out of a few reports. Included is a 1944 NACA reconstruction of the German V-1 buzz bomb (generally correct, but off in detail), three photos of a wind tunnel model of the Bell X-1 modified to have variable sweep wings, three pieces of NASA art depicting some then-future applications of space propulsion systems including a one-man lunar flyer, an early concept for what became Skylab, and a more advanced modular space station. The full-rez verions are available to all APR Patreon patrons at the $4 level and above. If interested, please consider signing up. There are a whole bunch of other goodies available in past months folders, more stuff coming.
Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon. If this sort of thing interests you, please consider signing up… not only will you help fund the search for obscure aerospace history, you’ll gain access to a lot of interesting stuff, not available elsewhere.
NASA has just released a report on a Europa lander mission. I haven’t read all the way through it (in fact, I’ve just glanced through it), but it seems fairly extensive. The lander design itself seems pretty preliminary. It also looks like a walking “rover,” but the legs are just long in order to allow the lander to safely come to rest on whatever terrain it happens to land on.
The lander would have instruments meant to look for the signs of life. Pretty obviously, the chances of life appearing *anywhere* near the surface of Europa are as close to zero as you can get. However, assuming that many, many kilometers below there is a liquid water ocean, and assuming that there is recognizable life swimming or floating around in the water, chances are fairly good that bits of it, everything from biochemicals on up to actual critters, would get trapped in the ice. Over extremely long periods of time the cold, icy equivalent of geological processes might drag that stuff up to the surface, where it might be detectable.
In December of 1948, American media outlets reported that Defense Secretary Forrestal had announced that the US wanted a space station for military purposes. The US had, in fact, been working on space for military applications since the end of World War II with both the US Navy and US Air Force studying space launch systems as early as 1944. However, the 1948 space station was most likely just a talking point, something that the Pentagon would *like* to have for any of a number of military purposes. So far as I’m aware, no actual designs produced by relevant government or corporate design bureaus have come to light. Still, the lack of anything firm to base an artists impression on didn’t slow down the media; a number of newspaper and magazine artists impressions were produced. Many of them, such as the one below (from the December 31, 1948, Washington Daily News, via an EBay auction), demonstrate a substantial lack of understanding of, well, *everything*. They tended to be a weird mishmash of Flash Gordon sci-fantasy with the V-2 and similar exotic and half-comprehended technologies.
Note that this cartoonish “space station” seems to have it all… radar, giant cannon barrels and a square mirror to reflect sunlight to set the enemy alight. This, of course, would not work.
Some time back there was an EBay auction for a Polaris display model with a difference. The missile itself seemed normal enough, but the warhead was distinctly unusual. It was a plexiglas cone filled with small metal spheres:
Assuming that this model is truly official (it seems to be, but who knows), then it would appear that Lockheed gave some thought to a Polaris armed with biological or chemical warheads. I would speculate that this probably isn’t a biological weapon… biowar agents are usually fairly slow and you generally want to distribute them quietly, while a SLBM is terribly fast and not at all sneaky. My guess is that the metal spheres are the M139 bomblets, designed to carry 590 grams of Sarin nerve gas. The M139 was loaded on the Honest John and Pershing missiles in the 1960’s. The preceding design was the M134 bomblet, some 334 of which could be carried by an Honest John, as shown in the display piece below:
I have doubts that the Navy would load Sarin or bioweapons on board a submarine… seems to be just asking for trouble. Perhaps this was for a land-transportable missile, carried on a trailer behind a truck. Lockheed tried to sell just such a thing a few times with no success.
In 1961 Ryan Aircraft looked at alternate means of ground launching their Firebee UAvs. A number of companies put forward ideas for various catapults. The SDASM Flickr account has illustrations of a number of the concept put forward. One of them was Brodie Rig, similar to the suspended runway I posted about a few weeks ago. Sadly details on this and the other studies is very limited… basically the date and the illustrations. The Brodie rig has what appears to be a winch a tthe end, indicating that the drone would have been accelerated not only by its jet engine but also the rig itself, getting it up to flight speed ASAP. Whether it would be able to be recovered with the rig at the end of the mission is difficult to determine, but doing so would require a definite level of precise flying that I’m not sure the Firebee would have been able to attain in 1961.
See somewhat higher rez version of this illustration HERE.
Below is a piece of Convair art from the SDASM Flickr account showing an early (1959) concept for a space booster with a glideback manned first stage. It’s a little unclear what’s going on with the second stage… the cutaway *seems* to show a space station-like payload where you’d expect to find the second stage engine.
Just sold on EBay (not to me, sadly) is a kinda rough Topping display model of a little known proposed variant of the Atlas space launcher, the SLV-3X. This design had a widened body, from ten feet to 12 feet, 7 inches. This allowed for more propellant to be carried without lengthening the vehicle, meaning that the existing launch infrastructure could be used. Additionally, the MA-5 sustainer rocket engine would be replaced with a higher thrust H-1D engine. See HERE for stats.
The SDASM Flickr account has a nice illustration of the SLV-3X/Centaur. See their site for the higher rez image.
Here’s an interesting illustration of the Polaris sea launched ballistic missile, taken from a technical manual. I’ve uploaded the full-rez version to the APR Patreon Extras Dropbox folder for 2017-01, so if you are interested, consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
