I'm Keepin' On Keepin' On

and being back to work keeps me busy. But good news! If you are looking for a silver lining, I've been drinking the balloon juice and working on a new series of airship posts.

Admittedly, the posts will not be this awesome, but I'm excited to be spergin' 'bout airships again.

 I've nearly finished the first draft of part one, which is always the hardest part. Once I start posting, I hope to do them about once a month - I figure three or four parts.

Meanwhile, the Ju 290 goes well:

I've done the panel-shading, and the splinter camo. Asking a few people about colors gave me the answer "trying to color-match World War 2 stuff is in a non-trivial sense a sucker's game", so I went with the shades that looked right. The grey is Vallejo's Basalt Grey, which when painted has a shade of purple in it. The green is a model master acryl RLM green, which I thought looked right. After putting down layers of future to strengthen the paint, I have to do the tricky bit: the hellblau underside. Somewhat trickier is that the hellblau goes over the fuselage as well, so much masking will be needed.

And here's something else: if you are reading this blog, you are probably familiar with the 1950s love of atomic power and the possibilities therein.

 The atomic train was one of the better ideas in the "powered by atomics" genre - this was one application where "bulky" and "radiation shield" actually synergized with the vehicle. One of these - nuclear submarines - would prove incredibly useful. Most of the others would not.

In the issue after the report on the first Voyage of the Nautilus,  1950s Life has a speculative report on the next step in aviation: the atomic plane.

Dreamed up as a plausible atomic plane using unclassified info, it has some, uh, interesting characteristic. For one, it has a removable atomic heart (which is what the door on top of the fuselage is for.) Because this spews lots of radiation (even by 1950s standards) everywhere, this requires some craftiness when refueling.

The whole airplane has to be dragged into a specially constructed hanger/hot room, where the reactor has to be removed by remote control, and placed in a pool. Meanwhile, the nose is on the other side of several feet of lead and concrete, and the squidgy organic bits can deplane in relative safety. The actual plane itself would have to have a 'massive' amount of shielding, which is just the thing aeronautical engineers like to hear. The people who made this design study still figured this would not be enough to protect the crew against significant radiation exposure, and figured that training flights would be kept to a minimum, and restricted to low power at that. The crew would undertake one actual mission on a full power profile - and then they would have received the maximum safe lifetime exposure to radiation, and would never fly the atomic hate needle ever again.

The idea persevered for a time, despite the fact it was obviously bonkers. The real killer from an engineering standpoint was simple: the stuff you need to shield yourself from radiation is by definition extremely dense and heavy, like lead. In order to make the aircraft remotely safe to the pilots or nearby people, you need so much lead your aircraft can't fly. When the atomic powered B-36 flew, it was easier to just shield the cockpit up front than it was to actually shield the reactor.

The NB-36H. While it never flew under nuclear power, it did successfully carry a critical reactor aloft.

 Late '50s Life has another snapshot which contains lots of possible atomic planes. You have to admire their perseverance, I suppose.

The main debate among the brains of the time was "should we modify an existing airframe or design a new one?" The main concern was of course a atomic plane gap with the Soviets.

This concept is interesting, though like the last bespoke atomic atomic bomber we've seen, it places special emphasis on putting the crew far away from the reactor, which tells me even 1950s engineers were not so confidant about the the whole 'lightweight radiation shield' problem.

 The atomic powered early warning aircraft makes sense, assuming you could build it big enough so that the crew isn't forced to live in Type VII U-boat squalor in a tiny shielded compartment at the front for weeks at a time. I'm not seeing the advantages of a nuclear powered B-57, though :/

Launching ICBMs from a nuclear powered airplane is, ah, interesting. ICBMs of this era were dangerous and finicky devices, even in temperature-controlled silos. The very idea of slapping one on a wing of a airplane flying in all weathers is probably giving retired missile men the willies even now. The "low level supersonic ramjet bomber" is probably actually less problematic from a maintenance standpoint, since I think Ramjets don't need moving parts. I also can't imagine it'd be more dangerous to its crews than the B-58. Then again, the accidents would probably be memorable in a way that a supersonic bomber merely exploding and crashing with a thermonuclear bomb on board positively dull.

Given how the 1950s rolled with Health and Safety, I think we should be glad it never happened.