OT: Drawings of the 1942 German V2 Rocket

Old draftsmanship was sometimes wonderful. It took a lot of skill and experience to do that with, often, ink on vellum or starched linen.

I actually took two semisters of engineering drawing, which nobody much liked but was really valuable. Lots of kids nowadays know how to drive Autocad but not how to draw. I still design with pencil on vellum.

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That's a bit late, Klaus. Seventy years ago and you could have made a lot of money.

Cheers

Now don't go off and build one of those in the garage, ya hear! :-)

The remarkable thing about those is how big they are (there are parts in the Science Museum in London), how many the Germans made in so short a time and how much it cost.

Cheers

This link says they were 45ft long and cost 100,000 Reichsmark initially and they pushed that down to 50,000 Reichsmark later.

Not sure if the 4.2 exchange rate still held at that time but it would mean in the end one such rocket cost $12k. That's not really expensive. But AFAIK they used slave labor for some of the production jobs. Anyhow, I am glad this chapter of history is over.

Not likely, the U.S. government awarded several million $$$ to GE to reverse engineer the simpler V1 and they couldn't get to square one with it.

That's why the government then proceeded to pry lots of scientists out of post-war Germany. The book "Operation Paperclip" is a very interesting read.

Same here. I had three semesters of "mechanical" drawing in Junior High School, then took a summer session at the High School (1955, the summer just prior to my entering High School). I submitted a number of drawings into the Southern West Virginia Student Craftsman Fair (WVUIT, see below), and took First Place in ALL categories ;-)

(I still have those drawings still stashed around here somewhere. I doubt that I can draw that good anymore, though I still draw preliminary sketches of circuits before entering them into CAD.) ...Jim Thompson

these guys are trying:

-Lasse

indeed but it also took whole lot of people to clean up drawings doing them in ink on that semi transparent paper so it could be copied

I did too, early 90's was probably one of the last years it was required, real draft tables with rulers on rails etc.

For quick sketch paper is fastest, but CAD where you can just type in accurate numbers, do measurements, move things around is real nice

-Lasse

I had a full-size drafting table until around 1994.

And an E-size hp plotter ;-)

...Jim Thompson

I have heard of them. Have they gotten something into space by now?

Considering how much more it cost to build a V2 than a bomber, and how much smaller the eventual payload, the V2 program was probably a net win for England.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

not quite :)

About a month ago the had a successful launch of their first active guided rocket, it reached 8250m and 1240km/h I think that was with their hybrid LOX/polyuretane engine

And they have run static test with a LOX/alcohol engine

-Lasse

For schematics, I find that library issues really slow me down, make me break my chain of thoughts when I need to draw a part that's not already created. And a tiny screen doesn't have the resolution (or the scribble-calcs-and-notes space) of a nice sheet of D sized vellum. The other virtue of D-sized vellum sheets is that they are hard to lose.

Hand-drafted schematics and hand-taped PC boards were incredibly labor intensive. "Draftsman" and "secretary" are pretty much gone. We still have PCB layout people.

I have a guy who does Autocad and Solidworks really well, so I give him a rough sketch and let him do the details. SolidWorks does gorgeous stuff, but there's a big learning curve (and cost per seat!)

The other game changer has been the whiteboard and the digital camera.

I think the Germans were working on an ICBM to hit the US. Might have killed a few cows at best.

The Japanese launched incendiary balloons and started a minor forest fire somewhere in the Northwest.

Just create generic symbols that require only entering the name of a subcircuit model...

Or, on a rainy evening, create a whole bank of generic symbols that only need a model name entered...

PSpice has the advantage that ctrl-G (get part) displays a list of parts AND a graphic view, so you know what you're getting.

And drawing parts in PSpice is downright trivial.

Yup. Somewhere, in my travels, I saw a whiteboard that could take its own photo. ...Jim Thompson

keeps amazing me how so many different airplanes, tanks, weapons, etc. were designed and build in huge number during those ~5years

today designing and building even a single simple airplane would probably take longer

-Lasse

that is fine for generic parts a like transistors, opamps ... not so much when you need a special ic etc.

we've had one that you just pushed a button and it scanned the board and printed on A4

-Lasse