Shipbucket

Based on some Soviet research into reusable spacecraft, Myasischev M-19 program had a lot of really interesting design decisions, including nuclear ramjet engines.
Shown here is one of the preliminaries of M-19-2 spacecraft from 1980, using 6 hydrogen-fueled jet engines.

This might not be the most accurate depiction of this spacecraft as the info on the whole program is very hard to find, while being pretty self-contradicting and limited.

A link for that thing:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/falsesteps ... -tail/amp/

There's actually more to that than this, sources in Russian provide more a bit more insight, as well as a couple of showcase technical drawings.

Sources I used were this and this.

Drawing itself is based on this variant of the plane:

Did a quick sketch of the AMROC Industrial Launch Vehicle 1

Further details can be found here

The estimable e of pi and I have been posting our timeline Boldly Going: A History of an American Space Station on AH.com

Today, I'd like to share with you some shipbucket art that I did in support of the timeline. Behold, the two winners of that universe's analog to the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program:

Heimdall:


Atlas III:


Background:

In support of the Shuttle and Shuttle-C programs, NASA gets the LRB funded. With this universe not having the National Launch System program, the Defense Department / USAF gets what became the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program about 2-3 years earlier than OTL. Given that, and the LRBs, Thiokol is trying to sell their solids to anyone who will buy, and they partner with Alliant Techsystems on Heimdall prior to a merger. They win one of the two spots, and the other goes to General Dynamics with their LRB-Derived booster, which they label as the "Atlas III" (It drops engines, has a centaur on top, and is built by General Dynamics - how is it not an Atlas?)

These win against a Martin Marietta proposal that looks a lot like the OTL Atlas V (probably called the Titan V here) and something else that we have left undefined.

Interesting concept, and great drawings.

After a very interesting drawing that I hope the artist posts soon was shown as WIP in discord, I remembered the story that in the early days of Space-X, Elon Musk traveled to Russia under the naive idea that he would be able to just buy rockets. After being laughed out of the country, he went on to build his own rockets, with pintle injection and landing legs and the rest as we know is history. As a result of remembering this I decided to do a quick sketch of an R-36 in SpaecX livery. It's not exactly a "Never-Was" as I'm not sure kind of rockets Elon was planning to buy and it isn't at all accurate to real world R-36 derived launch vehicles but for a 15 minute sketch I worked on intermittently while some code compiled and tests ran, I think it's an okay depiction of a "what if" alternate path that Space-x didn't go down. (And luckily so, I doubt such a venture would have worked out in the long run) I figured I'd share it here since I don't plan on working on it any further and I sometimes think that I don't post enough drawings here. My name isn't on the credits list partly due to forgetfulness and partly because I don't think 15 minutes of kitbashing really warrants adding is to the credits line.

okay! lemme have a go of what i've done recently!

this is a rendition of ISAS's Mu-5 solid-fuel launch vehicle, a total of 7 were launched, with one (M-V-4) ending in failure. the last flight of the M-V was in september of 2006, launching the SOLAR-A (hinode)

Quite nice, but I see some issues, like excess of double black lines, and if that long thing that extends almost for all the length of the 1st stage (across the letters M-V-3 and M-V-5) is (and I suspect it is) something more than just a panel line, but marks a "bulge", then I'd suggest marking it with significantly darker (albeit NOT black) shade.

we're back!

here's my most ambitious project to date! the SpaceX Starship! this took me a good 3 days to make and i'm pretty happy with how it turned out!