Diesel Engines in Space
Atomic Rockets divides fictional spacecraft into two varieties: those modeled on aircraft and those modeled on watercraft. The nonfictional spacecraft are all tail landing rockets of course. However in looking at the earliest Buck Rogers strips I found another type. Trains! When you look at the Satellite, she's a tractor design. The engine is in the front (you could make the case it's a Volkswagen design but that's just silly.) Buck clearly sees the similarities to a train as this panel shows: Naturally no one else sees it. they're used to flying around in rockets. He's the only one who ever saw a train. this was where I got the idea of train styled ships however. The Satellite's interior features were kind of ... inconstant because Lt. Dick Calkins was grinding out a daily strip and not a rocket engineer. But we have a couple of refs of the Satellite's control room and fixtures. Jeeze, look at those vacuum tubes! I bet the analytical e