US Bomber Projects Since WWII
The biggest post-Aerospace Projects Review writing project is a book on American bomber projects since the end of WWII. This book should wind up being relatively vast, with somewhere in the region of 300 bomber designs under consideration for inclusion.
At last! Progress! I have released a "Preview" of the US Bomber Projects book as a downloadable PDF file. This 39 page work contains information, drawings and all-new artwork on 15 designs ranging from WWII to today. Click here or on the Preview banner below to get more information!
This book will attempt to illustrate a vast array of bombardment aircraft. The designs range from manned to unmanned, subsonic to orbital; the criteria is that the vehicle be designed to deploy (drop or launch) weapons meant to take out fixed or strategic surface targets. Thus, a cruise missile is out, as it does not deploy a weapon (the weapon is integral), while a jetliner modified to fire cruise missiles is appropriate. And the F-111 and A-10 programs, while designed to drop bombs, are out because they were meant for largely tactical targets. "Attack aircraft" such as these warrant a follow-on book, which is currently planned. That is expected to include dedicated fighter-bombers, counter-insurgency craft, ground attack and anti-shipping planes.
There have been a number of distinct bomber development programs; there have also been a large number of designs put forward independent of a major Air Force contract. All will be covered.
A listing of chapters is below. Keep in mind that some will be small chapters, while others will be quite large.
B-36 Derivatives
B-47 Program
B-49 Program
B-52 Program
B-58 Program
B-70 program
B-1 Program
ATB/B-2 Development
Seaplane Bombers
Miscellaneous Designs (Convair XB-53, Boeing XB-55, Boeing XB-59, Martin XB-68, SR-71 bomber variants, others)
Nuclear Powered Bombers
Bombing Through Space (BoMi, HYWARDS, RoBo, Dyna Soar, on up to the present CAV-launchers)
Bombers of the Future (QSP, LRSA, B-3, BWB, etc)
In order to provide the best quality of illustration for this book, all aircraft will be represented with orthogonal views drawn by the author. This way, quality will be consistent - while in reality, the quality of available drawings can vary drastically.
The drawings below show the progress on the book. The drawings within each larger gif image are to the same scale, but the separate gif images are not to scale with each other. There is a 60-meter scale bar in each image. It is expected that finishing the complete set of drawings could take a year or more.
A snippet of one of the drawings (the Rockwell MRCC, if that helps) can be seen by clicking on the pic below. Hopefully you'll agree that the quality is pretty good.
This book began in October of 2003 when I was contacted by a publisher to see if I was interested in doing books on US bomber and fighter projects. Clearly, the answer was YES! However, the effort quickly fell through, as our "visions" for the books differed markedly. A book on US Fighter Projects Since WWII is a possibility for a follow-on, but more likely would be a smaller book on Attack Aircraft Projects. A fighter projects book done like the Bomber book would be huge.
Before this book can be finished, I will need to do some traveling, and visit a number of archives. This sort of thing ain't free. Since I have no publisher backing me up on this, I may release parts of the work early... a chapter, say, or a poster of drawings or some such.
Contact me by e-mail
scottlowther AT ix DOT netcom DOT com.
You will need to delete the spam-blocking capitalized bits in the e-mail address. It's clumsy, annoying and definitely non-professional looking... but unfortunately, spammers read email addresses and target you for massive amounts of junk mail if you don't play little tricks.
