Should have made one of those Saturn Vs out in the colors of the Vatican Strategic Rocket Force.
Australian Army United Nations peacekeepers on patrol duty in the streets of the city Los Angeles, California, in support of the United Nations Assistance Mission in the United States of America (UNAMIUSA), arrest and detain an American man suspected of looting. The man pleads with the soldiers, claiming that he was not looting. Photo by the Associated Press, taken on August 1st, 2007.
Neat photo, and it's certainly alternate history, but I think you meant to post it in the other thread, not this one, since it doesn't have anything to do with air or space that I can see...?
not bad, but mine are BAD ASSED!
and the best part is most if not all of these are from real world propsoals,
the ones with the Titan stages.
(pic found in a random google image search.)
Upper left: S 1B lower stage, upper stage...is there one?
Middle: Saturn V modification with F-1 based LRBs, not sure how many engines per but it looks like they may be essentially modified S1Cs. It'd be amazingly loud, for sure.
Upper Right: Saturn V modification, no SIVB, looks like Shuttle SRBs.
Lower Left: Pretty sure that's Jarvis
Lower Right: Saturn 1B-derived lower stage, maybe. The uppers...agena? I dunno, but they're pretty small-diameter.
Am I anywhere close?
Upper left: S 1B lower stage, upper stage...is there one?
Middle: Saturn V modification with F-1 based LRBs, not sure how many engines per but it looks like they may be essentially modified S1Cs. It'd be amazingly loud, for sure.
Upper Right: Saturn V modification, no SIVB, looks like Shuttle SRBs.
Lower Left: Pretty sure that's Jarvis
Lower Right: Saturn 1B-derived lower stage, maybe. The uppers...agena? I dunno, but they're pretty small-diameter.
Am I anywhere close?
It's Jarvis, I'm pretty sure. The first stage is indeed a 2xF1 kerolox, the second stage is J2-based hydrolox but not actually a SIVB (8.38 m diameter, not 6.6, and about 30 tons more fuel), the third stage is 8xR4D N2O4/MMH. It was a Hughes study in the mid-80s, capability to orbit of 38 metric tons.Lower Left: that is a new one for me, but it looks like it has a S-IVb second stage and a maybe 2 F-1 engine first stage.
Yeah, you got it. For comparison:Upper left: Looks like a baseline Saturn I to me. The S-IV was a bit smaller than the S-IVB, IIRC.
Can't be. Look at it, the 10 m diameter on the core continues up past the boosters. It's a cluster of 5 S1Cs with the standard 1xSII and 1xSIVB on top. A lot of lift, sure, but not 500 tons. It'd still need tons of pad mods.Middle: Looks like that one Boeing proposal to lash four S-ICs and four S-IIs together into a booster that could deliver 500 metric tons to LEO.
I'm not sure, they don't look wide enough in comparison to the 10 m S1C core. 260-inch is 6.6 m, so it should look similarly sized as the SIVB would, and those don't. I think Wingman's got it and those are 7-seg Titan solids.Upper Right: Look like 260-inch motors to me. See the CGIs I posted on the page before.
I'm not sure, they don't look wide enough in comparison to the 10 m S1C core. 260-inch is 6.6 m, so it should look similarly sized as the SIVB would, and those don't. I think Wingman's got it and those are 7-seg Titan solids.
[blinks]
Huh. I thought those were around an S-IC/S-II combo. But you're right, they are about the right diameter to be Titan III Solids if the core is a 6.6 meter stage. EDIT: And they have that tell-tale nozzle angle and N2O4 tank.
Ah...Saturn variants. What should have been if not for LBJ ordering the Saturn tooling destroyed, and Nixon not countermanding the order once he got into office. Some of those Saturn variants are very similar to what Stephen Baxter had in his novel Voyage, about a TL where there's no Shuttle, and Apollo derived hardware is the backbone of the program, with a U.S. human landing on Mars in 1985.
Pretty close, but I recall Baxter's Saturn VB (that's what he assumed NASA would designate it) had two SRBs instead of four. The whole Mars vehicle took nine launches with Saturn VB to assemble in LEO before the tenth launch, which had the crew and then departure: a Venus flyby for gravity assist before going to Mars-after a failure with a NERVA-powered Apollo in LEO (all three crew killed).
Voyage said:The five liquid rocket engines of the Saturn VB booster's first stage, the MS-1C, had ignited a full eight seconds ahead of the enhanced Saturn's four Solid Rocket Boosters
(bolded for clarity). The mission plan was a pretty standard opposition-class plan, there were plenty of those in the '70s and '80s OTL; they've just disappeared from the scene since Zubrin, more or less. The move towards ISRU and the scientific advantages of the conjunction-class plans (you get something like 20 times the surface duration for a 20% increase in overall duration) means they died out.
Looks like just the first stage with wings there in the second image, and the upper stages seem to lack wings in the full-vehicle first drawing. I could believe there's enough wing area there to sustain flight, the question is whether they'd have enough structural integrity and thermal protection to sustain the deceleration to landing speeds.Found it. It only appeared in some Popular Magazines in 1960 (according to the fellow who writes the Astronautix site). Here's another shot:
Can't tell if it's only the first stage or both stages that have wings.
How plausible could this design have been, anyhow?
Looks like just the first stage with wings there in the second image, and the upper stages seem to lack wings in the full-vehicle first drawing. I could believe there's enough wing area there to sustain flight, the question is whether they'd have enough structural integrity and thermal protection to sustain the deceleration to landing speeds.