Spaceship design of the 50ties

[murphyaa]

If you look at the top right corner of the graph paper drawing, there are two arrows definging the edges of a square, and a 5ft notation. So one grid square is 5 feet, making the drawing about 81 feet long.

[MRC]

Originally Posted by zubie

Actually I based my guess on that image. I counted 16 major divisions in the height, so I thought 1div/10 feet. On the other hand I had another look at the published image which I believe appeared in the book form of the Collier articles called "The Conquest of Space" which I scanned once but unfortunately the article is unavailable. (you can find the image at the atomic rocket poster page linked earlier)

In that image there is a small stylized human drawn next to it, so I decided to take a closer look at it. By checking the proportions of the person to the length of the ship, the ship is 15 times taller - of course how tall is the figure? If, figure is 6 feet, then it is 90 feet.

The lander version is stated at 160' and I found a good Von Braun sketch of the lander at Io9 and with the legs retracted it works out to...160'.

I'll keep looking into this. It does kind of define what size the airlock doors need to be.

To my knowledge, the only place where one can find the "Round the moon ship" is this:
Wernher von Braun "Round-The-Moon ship"
...Thanks to the proverbial german accuracy good ol'Wernher put 5feet to a square. I wonder if a modern EVA suit can go through such a little hatch and I didn't noticed the human figure until You mentioned it (at 5ft 6 tall he must have a bunch of teens in mind... even for the 50ties standard &#128522
Oh yes, the three landers are 160X110 ft accordind to Colliers.
By the by You can downlod them here:
Collier's articles on the conquest of space (1952-1954) - Space Stuff
I have the first book after the articles serie: Across the space frontier. The other two are still out of my grasp...
At nearly 200usd on Amazon for the couple... A bit too pricey...
Anyway, the only (usable) image in that book, besides the familiar Bonestell's painting, is this one - I took a quick image on the kitchen table😶

[zubie]

Originally Posted by murphyaa

If you look at the top right corner of the graph paper drawing, there are two arrows definging the edges of a square, and a 5ft notation. So one grid square is 5 feet, making the drawing about 81 feet long.

Ugh, it was staring me in the face! Thanks!

I have been hunting around for something definitive for 2 days now. ~81 feet seems it.

On the plus side, all this research pulled up some more good links
More images and sketches including a sketch with measurements of the lander which seems to indicate that the 160 feet refers to the length with unextended landing legs. Now that I know to look for the number between the arrows, it is pretty clear.

More io9 stuff
The Great 1952 Space Program That Almost Was
1950s Rocket Sketches Envision Manned Spaceflight
Also on the plus side, at this length MRC's request 1/48 scale is workable ~20inch

My old university library had a copy of the red cover "Conquest of Space" but unfortunately I scanned it into a mac that died so I have lost a lot of that info. I also have Fred Whipple's papers somewhere, but probably still in the box from the last move =-|

Should I move additional posts from Design Requests to Pasa or Alternate Worlds or stay here longer? (still bit of newbie in spite of incept date)

[elliott]

I think you're okay right where you are. If you wish to move a thread at some future point just let a mod or admin know and we'll take care of it for you.

[zubie]

Before I go onto the model design phase though I think the actual length of the ship is not as clear cut as everything else. I decided to overlay both images to get a better idea of how they relate to each other, and the result is a bit shocking.

Given the 160:80 is effectively 2:1 ratio, the main shock is the size of the habitation sphere (HS) shrinks by half. That in an of itself isn't bad, but it also applies to the airlock which now looks way too small to allow a fully suited human to get in and out of the ship. In fact it was probably always too small at the 80 foot scale.


I played with the image a bit and increasing the diameter of the airlock cylinder to 130% seems better, so I'm tempted to make that adjustment - particularly if I decide to add the lander to this and keep it to scale.
The engines and pumps are also scaled 2:1 effectively and this also feels wrong, on the other hand, I'm not a rocket engineer, so I guess I should leave that alone (?).

I know this feels pedantic, but given that this is a real space subject (although admittedly speculative) I want to make sure any mods or statements I make about the model are as correct as possible so I'm very much open to advice.

[zubie]

I've reworked some of the parts. Note on the image of the airlock dimensions above, which I'm sure you noticed. The diameter of the airlock is only around 5 feet, not 10. I think you can appreciate that those dimensions (5 foot diam/6 height) are fairly tight for the airlock, although it is larger than the actual LM habitable volume (8.8m^3 vs 4.5m^3). Even the hatch comparison is not that bad (VB orbiter 4x2? LM EVA hatch ~3x3).

Still, the sketches of both lander and orbiter are structurally the same (take one put it on top of the other and everything lines up - including the airlock). From a project dev. pov it actually makes sense that the basic components (Engine, ship frame, pumps, tanks, etc) should be the same. It is also curious that I'm having so much trouble finding definitive dimensional information on this ship other than the "5 ft" annotation which looks very different from other writing on the sketch. I can only come to the conclusion that the design at 160 feet was recognized as overkill for the intended mission (fly by) and the scaling was a measure of this (but exactly half??? tanks exactly 1/4 volume???). Oh well.

With regard to the model: I've kept the design close to the illustrations and sketches but have modified a couple of things. The pumps are not as detailed as illustrated, instead it is assumed some housing is provided. I kept pump-like appearance to it. Whether this builds nicely, I'll have to see. Also there are a lot of spheres and a torus. I wanted a good compromise between roundness and ease of building.

First image shows a comparison between the original airlock at about 5'd and the new one at 6.5'd which is the 130%, can now hold a 4x3 hatch. The second shows the pump modeling. I have no idea how to run the hoses, I figure using coated paperclips (purists can roll paper tubes I suppose).

[MRC]

Allow me to pontificate a little...
1)pedantry... No, I like to call that good judgement.
That said, a few words about my opinion on those airlocks. On the lunar landers (three huge crafts indeed, for a total crew of 50 compared to the moonship wich carried only 3 or 4 crew), or at least on the one wich served as material carrier, the other two were only personnel transports, the airlocks tunnel served also for move things between the personnel sphere and the cargo cylinder under it. Of course, the other two (only personnel) crafts didn't need such a big airlock, maybe the tought behind, was something like "one size fits all".
About my beloved moonship, I think that we have no right to change historical items because our current knowledge is much better. I truly hope that I do not sound too harsh; just reasoning. By the way, the russians did that mistake for real. Alexej Leonov had an historical "closed shave" when he tried to come back inside the Voshkod.
Look forward to further development.

[zubie]

Thanks for the input. I've tried to get more input from starship modeler, but no bite. I'll probably try the paper spaceship group on Yahoo next (haven't been there for a while). I'm going to stick with the airlock decision; it's the only thing I've really changed and it wouldn't take much to add the smaller airlock as an extra part. I actually agree with the one size fit all idea which is why the drastic change in scale makes so little sense to me. The airlock for the lander as shown is exactly twice as big...including the door. To me this last point screams that the orbiter's 80' length vs. the lander's 160' was a somewhat off the cuff calculation for a reduced crew mission of say 3-5 vs 10-25 penciled in for the art staff.

Back to the model: I've been experimenting with how to assemble the spheres starting with some rought prototypes. First I tried being clever, making a mix of ring and petal parts (sphere1). The second was one put together only with rings as an inner structure, then skinned over in ogive petals scaled just a tad bigger (sphere 2). The third was put together only from petals, using a slightly underscaled petal as internal tabs for the external overlay (sphere 3) similar to a method I described here.

Sphere 1 actually gave me probably the best shape, but was really hard to assemble due to the petal edges on the rings being hard to glue together at the edges...and there were a lot of those. Sphere 2 was fairly straight forward and went together the fastest, but the bumpiness of the ring assembly still shows through, although the effect was lessened with some quick shaving of the edges off with an Xacto. Sphere 3 was a little harder to put together and got rid of the bumpiness, but hard to get really even. Slight errors caused the shape to be less than spherical. The end cap piece showed the degree of error, and the gap was greatest in 3 and least in 1.

First image shows the structure for the first two spheres, the rings of 2 and the basic parts of 1. The second shows the half skinned version of 2. The third shows the finished version of 3. The fourth shows the mixed version (sphere 1) on bottom, the ring+petal (Sphere2) on upper left, the petal only (sphere 3) on upper right. Now I have to pick which one is the best since it will also be the basis for the tanks.

[Deriachai]

I can say I like the look of 4 the most, though it appears to be the most work.
Failing that, I prefer vertical spheres for looks, and buildability. At least, that has been true of the tanks I have made so far. Much easier to make one that is straight, and looks nice as a vertical (Leo Style), vs stacking onion rings.

[SCEtoAUX]

Maybe you could use a hectohexecontadihedron as a basis to work from.
Here is a picture of one I built many years ago when experimenting for a shape to make a globe:
.

The paper model net was obtained from here
Paper Hectohexecontadihedron

Looks like you might be able to add more panels to get a more rounded look if needed.