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Catching Pictures in the Air


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Very nicely done! I'm still dreading my first attempt at soldering...

btw, no wonder you got strange energies, you're supposed to use cherry blossoms in Japan!

 

Ian

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Great stuff. Very tidy soldering and the usual extensive research :thumbsup2: 

 

Engrossing. Do you recommend any particular brand/type of Kenyan tea to sharpen the edges of the brain? Big tea fan myself :).

 

Best regards

TonyT

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The Discover jobbie is 21000 lbs and has three 110 footers on it.

 

The Corona recovery bucket was easily liftable by two blokes,sooooo I'm thinkin'(and looking at the shots of a 119 catching one),

you probably looking at a 35-50 footer possibly.

 

Think of the rate of descent and work from there,too fast and they'd miss,too slow and they'd risk spearing it on the 119's hooter.

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On ‎07‎/‎04‎/‎2017 at 11:54, The Spadgent said:

Floating diorama? UFO style? :lol:

I am intrigued! but then I would be.

 

Martian

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"Oooh. That summer in 1980 I spent up a tree in the garden of the flats where we lived reading Carl Sagan's Cosmos finally comes in useful. I knew my family were wrong about me.:rofl:

That's a very (planetary) elliptical statement Tomo! :worthy:. Did you ever read his Somnium btw? A staggering piece of conjecture for the early 17th century...:book:"

 

I haven't read the latter but have a well thumbed copy of Cosmos, plus I well remember the series on the telly. The builds getting better and better, love the soldering and stuff, plus you've got the Alvin Stardust black gloves on the go again. Wot's not to like!

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6 hours ago, limeypilot said:

Very nicely done! I'm still dreading my first attempt at soldering...

btw, no wonder you got strange energies, you're supposed to use cherry blossoms in Japan!

Goshdarnit! I told you it was bad feng-shui !

 

I'm still in the very early stages of learning soldering myself Ian, practically all I know comes from my guru on the forum Nigel Heath. Ced pointed out his Gazelle build to over here:

Which is a fount of modelling wisdom about soldering and much else, including onion soup! 

 

5 hours ago, rob85 said:

That is some canny work Tony, looks nice and extremely neat.

Thanks Rob. :thumbsup2:

5 hours ago, TonyTiger66 said:

Great stuff. Very tidy soldering and the usual extensive research :thumbsup2: 

 

Engrossing. Do you recommend any particular brand/type of Kenyan tea to sharpen the edges of the brain? Big tea fan myself :).

Cheers! :thumbsup2:  As to tea TT, the current slosh of choice at Maison Baron is this stuff:

 

522203_256x311.jpg

Blended in Dublin since the late 18th century. My wife's cousin Joseph (a big bear of a Roscommon farmer) put us on to it a while back. He drinks it by the bucket and works 28 hours a day on the strength of it. A real good deep brew. If you can't get it in Oz tell me and I'll happoly send you a tin! :nodding:

 

4 hours ago, Cookenbacher said:

My head is swimming after reading the last few pages: magnets, soldering, Kepler. Fantastic thread Tony.

My thanks to you for that Cookie. Glad you're enjoying it sir. :thumbsup:

2 hours ago, Miggers said:

The Discover jobbie is 21000 lbs and has three 110 footers on it.

 

The Corona recovery bucket was easily liftable by two blokes,sooooo I'm thinkin'(and looking at the shots of a 119 catching one),

you probably looking at a 35-50 footer possibly.

 

Think of the rate of descent and work from there,too fast and they'd miss,too slow and they'd risk spearing it on the 119's hooter.

Nailed it Miggers.

 

Recovered weight of Corona capsule: approx. 100lbs

ROD: 1500ft. per minute.

 

Once again the Starcatcher oral history comes up with the telling detail:

2017-04-09_08-46-13

 

Paracheroot @approx. 25ft diameter.

 

To ensure the brass hooks on the recovery lines didn't rip through the canopy fabric, it had a reinforced band built into it. 

 

1 hour ago, Martian Hale said:

I am intrigued! but then I would be.

Are you allowed to share your technologies with the people of this planet? :D

55 minutes ago, Tomoshenko said:

The builds getting better and better, love the soldering and stuff, plus you've got the Alvin Stardust black gloves on the go again. Wot's not to like!

Thangyouverimushhh. ^_^

hqdefault.jpg

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1 hour ago, TheBaron said:

 As to tea TT, the current slosh of choice at Maison Baron is this stuff:

 

522203_256x311.jpg

 

That looks like it needs a china teapot & a strainer. A perfect illustraion of how tea bags have ruined modern society....:whistle: 

 

Keith

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I could share some of the technology with you but then I would be forced to rend thee in the gobberwarts with my burglecruncheon and that could be a bit messy!

 

Martian

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9 hours ago, TheBaron said:

Nailed it Miggers.

 

Recovered weight of Corona capsule: approx. 100lbs

ROD: 1500ft. per minute.

 

Once again the Starcatcher oral history comes up with the telling detail:

2017-04-09_08-46-13

 

Paracheroot @approx. 25ft diameter.

 

To ensure the brass hooks on the recovery lines didn't rip through the canopy fabric, it had a reinforced band built into it. 

 

Here you go Baroni,you like jazzy formulae and calculation:

 

http://www.pcprg.com/rounddes.htm

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10 hours ago, keefr22 said:

tea bags have ruined modern society....:whistle: 

Although I am second to none in my love of a good cuppa Rosie Lee, fancy tea bags are an essential modelling component when it comes to mesh grilles...

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1 hour ago, AdrianMF said:

Although I am second to none in my love of a good cuppa Rosie Lee, fancy tea bags are an essential modelling component when it comes to mesh grilles...

Good point, well made!

 

K

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9 hours ago, Martian Hale said:

I could share some of the technology with you but then I would be forced to rend thee in the gobberwarts with my burglecruncheon and that could be a bit messy!

Yikes!:yikes::lol:

6 hours ago, Miggers said:

Here you go Baroni,you like jazzy formulae and calculation:

 

http://www.pcprg.com/rounddes.htm

Miggers! I remain in awe of your ability to hoik the telling detail out of the ether at the drop of a hat like that.:worthy: That site is fascinating and I'm already addicted. 

3 hours ago, AdrianMF said:

Although I am second to none in my love of a good cuppa Rosie Lee, fancy tea bags are an essential modelling component when it comes to mesh grilles...

Mesh grilles? Isn't that Bear's younger brother - one they don't talk about since that notorious 'what does koala taste of' video emerged?

2 hours ago, keefr22 said:

Good point, well made!

IIRC weren't those t-bags one of those foul herbal bonfire nightmares that Adrian's addicted to?;)

 

Now men. Some progress to report but we're inching along in this phase as there's so many possible ways I could cock this part up without frequent pauses for appraisal. This is wholly due to the complex set of heights and angles involved in two different sets of structures with their uprights in different places, yet having to hold both retrieval poles at the same angle and height on each side of the fuselage.:banghead:

 

Ignore the current rough dungeon-like quality of the forward bulkhead if you can - that'll receive a similar 'textured foil' treatment as the ceiling later, whilst the door-frames at the top will have curtains scrunched up over them:

33566807180_aecf03fba0_c.jpg

The main purpose of this viewing angle is to match the respective heights of these two uprights to what can be seen in @71challys reference photos posted here a few pages back - ones that I've come to rely on so heavily for this section of the build. Those look ok in terms of how they triangulate with each other and the doorway into the flight deck behind, so time to start adding to them. Shaun the Sheep here:

33566801090_61ca00e7d6_c.jpg

..is actually a beautiful butterfly when hatched from solder:

33138788373_2afbeaf7f0_c.jpg

I must confess that I was seized by a sudden desire to build a Napoleonic semaphore station when this first emerged from the cocoon.

 

The previous mounts I built for the port side had too many problems height-wise so I've cannibalized them to use in this newer version. All very well gurning over this on the slab but how's it look on the Box:

33108528914_790f583a20_c.jpg

Getting there slowly but surely.

 

it's always salutary to stop and remind yourself about the huge difference that viewing angles make for such elements - the foreshortening in the above shotgives little sense of how far the poles are apart when viewed from the side:

33951975825_5c43a2d3ee_c.jpg

It would be very easy to make a mistake and get fixated on building to a single photograph or point-of-view, forgetting this is a puzzle in three-dimensions. Now. the real proof of concept will be to lay down the retrieval poles to see how well the two sides match each other at this stage. Fixed temporarily with Blu-Tak:

33951978615_e1f3e65ea4_c.jpg

Rather pleasing to find out that aside from an adjustment to the starboard set, this is looking rather..well...accurate might not be the exact word...Sir Humphrey might opine that it was perhaps  'sufficiently adjacent to reality to present the required degree of verisimilitude for the purposes of the exercise'.

 

Give us a twirl Anthea:

33951977225_0558158f49_c.jpg

Above:

33566806080_fe53296192_c.jpg

Nice to see you.

 

To see you.

 

Nice.

 

yEj7Y7.gif

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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It's early....many big words....where's....my....coffee???  Ah, that's better....Looks as though you've cracked the basic framework, nicely done!

 

Ian

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Thought you'd like that Tony.

 

Nice brarss work BTW.

 

My obs.with recovery is thus,assuming:

 

1/. The a/c was being operated at 10,000 or less,no oxygen masks on the recovery crew in th'back(that I can see)and

opening the beaver tail meant de-pressurerising(was the 119 pressurised?).

 

2/ A ROD of 1500 fpm means that after acquiring visuals,from 10,000,the Buck 19 crew only had a bee's wing over 6 1/2

minutes to perform intercept and capture before the bucket splashed down in oggin.

 

3/ Viewing a snatch from the 7-8'o clock posit.( Goo-on Ced,you know you want to)on the a/c's rear port quarter,

it can be seen that the target's brolly isn't much below the a/c's belly,so I'm guessing the a/c ROD was decreased slightly

and the nose possibly put on the horizon(possibly an increase of power or flaps up to gain a little speed too).

 

4/Once capture was effected(dependant on final capture alt.)the a/c possibly goes into a slight climb so that the joes

"down the back" can reel the goodies in.

 

I dunno any "real" 119 pilots,so can't really have a chat about what they'd reckon would be the best approach speeds.

Don't forget that the 119's flaps aren't particularly powerful(the kite accelerates well,but isn't to good at slowing down)

so it'd all have to be set up at a good distance from the predicted intercept point.

 

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1 hour ago, Miggers said:

The a/c was being operated at 10,000 or less,no oxygen masks on the recovery crew in th'back(that I can see)and

opening the beaver tail meant de-pressurerising(was the 119 pressurised?)

 

The C-119 looks as pressurizable as the Titanic!

It wasn't (think that came in with the C-130), oxy masks were the only way above 10k.  I think the snatch altitudes were around 15k feet?

 

Excellent work again Tony!

Oh, you've probably seen this, but just in case http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/corona/StarCatchersWeb.pdf

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34 minutes ago, 71chally said:

The C-119 looks as pressurizable as the Titanic!

It wasn't (think that came in with the C-130), oxy masks were the only way above 10k.  I think the snatch altitudes were around 15k feet?

 

Excellent work again Tony!

Oh, you've probably seen this, but just in case http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/corona/StarCatchersWeb.pdf

Certainly 15 thou. with Charlie chally(eh?) and at 120-150 ASI(again certainly easier to do with Charlie).

 

I had a gander at the USAF's own film done onboard a Dollar 19 and could'nt see any oxy-masks on the back end crew,

hence my suspicion of 10 thou and below,but the Buck 19's ceiling is quoted at 30000,so oxygen must've been used somewhere.

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6 hours ago, limeypilot said:

It's early....many big words....where's....my....coffee???  Ah, that's better....Looks as though you've cracked the basic framework, nicely done!

There's just so many ways I could get this part wrong Ian...I'm practically dreaming retrieval poles at the moment...:banghead:

3 hours ago, hendie said:

how can you make laying down two bits of brass rod so gollygeegoshdarnit interesting ?

Easy-peasy. By learning from the likes of you dear boy - your Lysander epic is still very fresh in my mind! :thumbsup2:

3 hours ago, Miggers said:

was the 119 pressurised

Not to my knowledge. In the Aerofax volume it details both oxygen cylinders for the crew (presumably walkaround sets?) in nearly all variants, whilst the troop carriers appear to have a bulky set of air tanks for the squaddies before they tip them out on their brollies. I've not seen any crew wearing masks for recovery in the 'J's in references. 

 

Your analysis seems to pretty spot on from my readings Miggers - I think the best they could hope for in the recovery window was 2-3 passes at most, otherwise the capsule went for a swim and had to be plucked from the Pacific. I can heartily recommend the Star Catcher  oral history that @71chally lists above - by far the most informative source for actual operational procedures and flight profiles etc.. Most online accounts just seem to recycle the same limited set of facts and are of limited use on that basis.

 

The capsule itself was 33" in daimater and 27" high, so quite small, weighing about 100lbs at recovery (much of which was the film spool itself)

 

Until visual acquisition, locating the capsule was by locking on to its radio beacon via the two aerials on the nose of the aircraft, using the differential in signal strength between left and right aerials to get a fix. It could only give azimuth in the way, providing no data on elevation of the capsule in relation to the aircraft.

 

I forget exactly how long the C-119 was used for until superseded by the more advanced C-130 on these ops - it certainly wasn't long and in relation to the massive amount of training these crews did, the actual number of recoveries was quite modest.

1 hour ago, 71chally said:

I think the snatch altitudes were around 15k feet?

There or therabouts James. On the first successful recovery Pelican 9 was at about 12K feet when it first made a first pass by the descneding capsule. Airspeed IIRC was about 150 mph. Chapter 2 of the Star Catcher history you mention has a well-detailed account from A2C Daniel Hill of this phase.

1 hour ago, CedB said:

Score two Miggers - fnaar fnaar! (The other's for the gratuitous beaver reference, of course)

Good man Ced. :thumbsup2:

 

 

A  bit more for ye this evening. Fed up with swearing and constantly having to readjust bits of Blu-Tak each time I knocked something, I did what I should have done to start with and put together a jig to hold the necessary pieces in relative alignment:

33802160542_c7257e299c_c.jpg

Admittedly this looks like something out of one of the cheaper episodes of Blake's 7, but is is at least functional for my needs at present, mainly to ensure that both poles are at the same slope - a critical problem to keep an eye on:

33574794490_8b68abbe31_c.jpg

Having got that sorted, it seemed wise to have a look at the hydraulic mounts that the poles are fed into for deployment, especially as in the finished pose this part of the aircraft will be bearing the weight of whatever is dangling out of the back. At first I thought I'd be clever and use a hole punches to knock out some components from the centre of some old Me109 wheels:

33918633646_cd347a5a47_c.jpg

But it looked rubbish and out of scale. Yuk.

 

Version two involved biting the bullet and knocking it all up from scratch. Firstly a set of 4mm diameter blanks from punched out from 1mm black plasticard:

33574795580_97e9876b2f_c.jpg

Then the ghastly task of turning these blanks into the the odd-shaped hinged mounts you see in yellow at the rear here:33740738151_5507df54ab_b.jpg

TBH I hadn't planned on doing so much swearing this evening but that soon changed when I got down to trying to connive plastic into something resembling the blunt 'duck-head' profile of those mounts:

33574786330_109889599d_c.jpg

This was the easy part. The next stage of creating the blanks for the hinge and the other rhomboid bit below the collar was quite challenging. First up I made a blank, then glued it to three other pieces of card to use as a guide for the Dremel to cut out the profile. Oddly like the head of Marvin the Paranoid Android here:

33574788160_e0b1f4187b_c.jpg

Separated  out they looked a tad on the bulky side:

33959749935_b9044b0eb7_c.jpg

But once thinned down and a circular opening cut out to allow for it to be mated to the collar, not so bad:

33918627936_7eb3596245_c.jpg

I had initially elected to cut out that circular area with a hole punch to match the size of the collar. Big mistake.:wall: Ping Ping Ping went three of them of into the dark recesses of the workroom in quick succession, never to be seen again. So.back to this stage again:

33574788160_e0b1f4187b_c.jpg

and repeat all of the above until we get to here (this time I ground the circles out with the Dremel to avoid a repeat pingfest):

33802159452_92314e50c3_c.jpg

Once glued, we have ended up with black duck heads:

33574791810_8fde94bbd5_c.jpg

Not pretty, but with some filling and shaping still to do, almost there.

 

Night all.

:bye: Tony

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Coming along Tony. They will be fine after a bit of filing and sanding. No real easy way of doing this sort of thing. I did think of punching out a number of blanks and then filing to shape, but as you experienced (and I continue to do so myself) it's just a breeding ground for a ping fest. Also handling and holding the damned things.... plenty of cussing.

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Super scrach building tony ,even the lego from the set of blakes 7, that brings back some memories ,servalan, mmm very strict i bet, i liked her

Glynn

blakes-7-c8-rumours-of-death-servalan-10

Edited by Hewy
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