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 engines have five times the power of twentieth century devices!


Gears, levers on the floor. Look at them. They say train to me. Honestly if you were living in the late 20's trains were the most high tech conveyance people were familiar with. It was an interesting sort of style for Calkins to use. He was an aviator and you might think why not base it on aircraft (which he was quite good at rendering)?

the aircraft Calkins was familiar with were similar (if not actual models of) the JN-4. those things had a range of about 300 kilometers. Spacecraft like the Satellite were supposed to house a crew for long distance journeys. The choices for long distance travel back then were a ship, a train, or an airship (Buck even hangs a lampshade on that by referring to the first Mongol raider he sees as a dirigible.) He'd already used dirigibles to model the Han ships so the Americans needed something different.

I also note that while the Satellite does have portholes to look outside. You can see Wilma standing in front of one below (and she looks lovely). The people in the control room use a view screen or televizo-ron or what have you. Odds are those lights above it indicate various conditions (such as -ease-off-the-throttle-or-you'll-kill-us-idiot! That's second from the right. This might be the first instant of a remote viewing display on a rocket.


Seriously, I'm wondering what the story is with those tubes? Any gear heads out there want to tell me why they built them so much bigger? they might contain some kinds of gases for life support or coolant. I try to do these write ups from the stand point that some of their technology looks like old fashion equipment but is actually something very different. 

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